Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing DevOps Solution Providers

The way of business solutions www.insightssuccess.com August 2017

Editorial Talk DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops

DevOps Forecast What Future Holds for DevOps

Tarun Gangwani Head of Product

Grok

Transforming Cloud Operations with Machine Intelligence and Automation

Editorial

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here are distinctive perspectives in the industry on how DevOps functions. Some consider it to be a shift in IT culture which is changing the way thoughts are composed into practical solutions. Then again, some IT experts see it simply as a job title, and in extreme cases, they consider DevOps to be the direst outcome imaginable for rehashing the IT advancement wheel.

Considering that the DevOps structure is as yet developing, I believe one needs to comprehend its fundamental standards, themes, and suggestions. DevOps has roots penetrated in Agile system administration and Enterprise System Administration (ESM) developments that began in the mid-2000’s, with the hunt for better approaches to get things done.

DevOps: An IT Revolution in the Making?

DevOps gives a typical work bench for design architects, Business Analysts (BAs), testers, developers, framework engineers, release engineers, Database Administrators (DBAs), operations staff, security experts and network engineers. Taking a closer look at the DevOps system, it features similar principles that are incorporated into the current Agile development framework.

However, DevOps additionally targets IT development productivity, giving more emphasis on healthier collaborations and gives pragmatic reactions to changes regarding adaptability and flexibility. The most imperative part of DevOps, however, is its capacity to enable IT groups tune their engines for leaner development practices, with a more honed focus on final operational prerequisites.

DevOps ventures the horizon where operations and development teams partake together amid the entire lifecycle of service delivery, from design to progressive improvement, and into the production bolster stage. This critical part of DevOps calls for the augmentation of Agile development to concentrate on more operational perspectives, empowering greater advancement and operation synchronization.

DevOps, in all honesty, highlights that lacking communication and synchronization between IT development and operation groups can prompt disappointments in accomplishing desirable service delivery results. I think DevOps means to bridge the critical disengages between the two teams.

DevOps requests a move in considering, as far as not isolating the development and operations groups superfluously. It highlights that firmly synchronized development and operation groups, upheld by strong leadership from within a business, can do much more.

Abhijeet Parade

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Ariana Lawrence Managing Editor Abhijeet Parade Co-Editors David Smith Sourav Mukherjee Kaustav Roy Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Alex Noel Picture Editor Vijaykumar Dudhbhate Art Editor Vinod, Shweta Business Development Manager Mike Thomas Nick Adams Marketing Manager Philip Walker Business Development Executives Andy, David, Peter, Kevin, John, Brian Research Analyst Jennifer Circulation Manager Robert Database Management Steve Technology Consultant Vishal More sales@insightssuccess.com

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Articles Editorial Talk DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops

DevOps Forecast What Future Holds for DevOps

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CXO Standpoint

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Grok:

Oil and Gas Industry in the Midst of Strictest Regulations

Transforming Cloud Operations with Machine Intelligence and Automation

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CloudHesive:

Enabling Companies to Adopt and Manage the Best Practices of DevOps

Kovair Software: Integrated ALM and DevOps by Connecting Your Development Tools

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OpenMake Software: Helping Enterprises with Their Scalable Agile DevOps Solutions

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Ranger4: A DevOps Evolution Expert Leading the Voyage

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Sematext: Helping Organizations to Perform Better

Spotinst: Helping Organizations to Run Mission-Critical Applications at 1/10 of its Standard Compute Price

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Versent: The Perfect Cloud Transformation Partner

DevOps at the Brink of Fourth Industrial Revolution

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evOps is an advancing model of product delivery that facilitates better and quicker rates of progress through the enhancement of development and delivery forms. It is a working culture that separates the customary siloes between development, operations and all partners in the delivery procedure that eventually drives better business results quickly. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution presses upon every one of us, many in the industry accept effective Digital Transformation activities will require DevOps to be the main impetus. DevOps systems are now being used by 74% of technology experts working today, and IDC trusts that 80% of the main 1,000 organizations will be grasping DevOps rehearses by 2019. Undoubtedly, it is practically sure that DevOps will support the 4IR – it’s occurring as of now.

To bring forward such DevOps solutions providers that are using DevOps to its fullest possible potential, we have come up with an annual listing of The 10 Fastest Growing DevOps Solution Providers 2017. In this issue, we have highlighted DevOps solution providers that have grown at exceptionally high speed and transformed the way DevOps industry works.

As our cover story, we have Grok, a cloud analytics and automation platform that detects anomalies within infrastructure and applications that is enabling self-healing cloud apps and systems predict and respond to potential IT incidents. Using algorithms built on 10+ years of machine intelligence R&D, Grok’s platform deeply understands a company’s cloud system using readily available IT operations data. Led by Tarun Gangwani, Head of Product, who is an award-winning product and design professional whose work has been used by millions of people around the world, Grok is leading the industry from the front.

Following to cover story, we have CloudHesive for providing cloud-based solutions through its consulting and managed services with a focus on security, reliability, availability, and scalability. Kovair Software for providing innovative ALM tools integrations. OpenMake Software, which strives to dramatically solve customer problems with their scalable agile DevOps solutions. Ranger4, Europe’s leading DevOps Evolution Consultancy which is helping to deliver better software in a faster and safer way. Sematext for offering infrastructure and application performance monitoring and log management solutions. Spotinst that allows its clients to reliably run their production and missioncritical applications at a fraction of their overall computing price. Versent, which is changing the landscape of the enterprise digital economy by bringing a modern-day approach to a world of old-school thinking.

Apart from these quickly growing DevOps providers, we have Editorial Talk – “DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops” and DevOps Forecast – “What Future Holds for DevOps.” Let’s get stared. Shall we?

www.inď€ onic.com

Cover Story

Tarun Gangwani Head of Product

Transforming Cloud Operations with Machine Intelligence and Automation

“Proactively

detect incidents and act with speed�

Cover Story

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s core IT has become the center of innovation for business, so too has DevOps evolved into a key facilitator of delivering solutions to the market across the public as well as private cloud. Companies that have embraced digital transformation have become readily accessible to consumers, receiving constant and relentless feedback on how to improve their products. As requirements go downstream at a rapid pace, DevOps has needed to fight more fires and react to increased complexity.

They are strapped for time and must juggle multiple responsibilities to stay afloat.

The discipline is at peak demand, and DevOps continues to be the lifeblood of an IT operations center, streamlining deployment and management of applications and services at the face of consistently expanding requirements of users. As customers become more connected and engaged with businesses, enterprises will need the DevOps discipline to help them migrate the solutions to digital platforms.

Customers expect solutions to “just work,” and DevOps provides the necessary capabilities to respond to a myriad of issues that can spring up in everyday use.

Believing the same and utilizing machine intelligence and automation to its fullest, Grok is enabling self-healing cloud apps and systems to predict and respond to potential IT incidents. Using algorithms built on 10+ years of machine intelligence R&D, Grok’s platform deeply understands a company’s cloud system using readily available IT operations data. Once Grok detects unusual activity within cloud services, apps or other metrics, the platform provides integrations and tools to proactively respond to system changes with no need for human intervention. Grok gives time back to operations teams, so they can focus on building innovative solutions, freeing up much needed operating expense in today’s cloud-first world.

Transforming IT into a Core Competitive Advantage Today’s DevOps engineers are strapped for time and resources, shouldering the burden of the entire IT stack and ensuring systems meet the demands of cloud scale.

Missteps conducted by IT result in devastating effects on business, including customer churn and high operating expenses. Unfortunately, some companies still see IT as a cost-center, providing a means to an end for building their core business.

Contrary to this, Grok believes that machine intelligence and automation can transform IT into a core competitive advantage for businesses, and helps companies harness the

data that provides the insights required to make optimization decisions on how to build and manage cloud environments. They wish to help businesses by reducing this maintenance burden on DevOps teams by shifting the responsibility of everyday maintenance to the machines themselves. This gives teams time to build proactive processes to help deliver innovative experiences to the market.

Grok’s open platform ensures cloud-based businesses

We believe the optimizations Grok provides with machine intelligence will help support DevOps and

meet the challenges faced today for companies as a whole

within any industry harness the power of machine intelligence and automation. The company’s patented core anomaly detection engine provides a key competitive advantage for companies looking to get started with machine intelligence, providing a much-needed solution to a growing problem in the market. The company’s algorithms work with streaming telemetry data sources, offering insights with each new data point received from an app or service. Once an anomaly is detected, the Grok platform includes built in automation capabilities to respond to system changes with speed.

At Grok, the team believes humans should be focused on higher order, challenging problems that businesses face, and wants to give companies more time to meet the needs of their clients. Grok provides the missing links people, processes and systems in order to create an operations ecosystem that automatically responds to business demand.

An Award-winning Product and Design Professional Tarun Gangwani is Head of Product at Grok. He is an award-winning product and design professional whose work has been used by millions of people around the world.

With his background in cognitive science and design, Tarun

His work has been recognized by numerous outlets, including the New York Times. In 2016, he was selected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, which features entrepreneurs and leaders in business and technology from around the world.

Before IBM, Tarun has worked in various positions in design, technical consulting, and web development. He is a proud Indiana University alumnus, with degrees in cognitive science and human-computer interaction design.

“We have developed Grok to

respond to the pressure DevOps has within businesses” has delivered user-centered solutions to start-ups and enterprise companies within a wide variety of industries that leverage cloud technologies to deliver innovation to their clients. Tarun’s perspectives and work have been featured in major news publications, including the New York Times, CIO.com, Tech.Co and Forbes.

Tarun joined Grok as a co-founder in 2016 to manage design and development teams to deliver compelling user experiences for

businesses managing their cloud workloads. Currently, he runs product, design and development for Grok.

Previously, Tarun led multidisciplinary product development teams within IBM’s $9 billion cloud business. Tarun was a pioneer in designing IBM’s cloud developer platform, Bluemix. It has since become the largest open-source cloud platform in the world. He joined IBM in 2013 as part of the company’s first wave of designers, which is now 1,000-strong.

Providing Data-driven Insights across Multiple Contexts Within hours of setup, Grok provides data-driven insights across multiple contexts, from application performance metrics to infrastructure health. These insights provide a crucial trigger for creating self-healing cloud services, reducing mean time to respond and increasing service availability. Grok believes in the long term, DevOps and IT will gain more bandwidth to focus on building innovative solutions, proactively responding to IT incidents, instead of reactively fighting fires.

“DevOps has shepherded new ways to deploy, manage and scale apps and services across hybrid cloud environments, optimizing the way businesses run from core infrastructure to API calls on the edge. Without DevOps, we would not have the billion user platforms with exponential concurrent active devices on a single network. The discipline has helped businesses transform the way we do work and commune as a global society,” – Tarun asserts.

Conversely, Tarun believes that this rapid growth and expansion of the discipline has increased their reliance upon it. “DevOps engineer demand is at an all-time high, and companies have needed to reallocate investments in other areas to support their need for

Cover Story

the discipline within their environments. At the end of the day, companies still need things faster and cheaper while also being of high quality. As a result, companies will need to figure out ways ensure investment in DevOps does not overwhelm the entire organization, stifling innovation and progress forward. Furthermore, DevOps itself will need to further optimize its tools and processes for businesses to manage its exponential growth within organizations. We believe the optimizations Grok provides with machine intelligence will help support DevOps and meet the challenges faced today for businesses as a whole,” – Tarun answers to the opportunities that come with DevOps. Razor Focused on Customer Success Everyone on the Grok team is razor focused on customer success, which by extension benefits the company itself.

Each of them works to bring their solution to new customers every day, while uniquely tailoring capability to a wide variety of IT environments. The team constantly listens to the market for the latest in the industry, questioning where future innovations can be made in both IT operations management and the lifecycle of cloud services.

Tarun believes that all startups should look to solve human problems within organizations, building technology and

defensible IP that meets the needs of their clients.

“Companies that build technologies and search for a problem to solve will struggle to bring their product to market. Instead, companies should assemble teams of people who empathize with the problems in enterprise IT today,” Tarun advises to growing startup companies.

Eyeing for the Better Future Grok will continue to evolve as the world’s industry-leading self-healing cloud operations platform. The company’s platform will include new capabilities to uncover latent relationships among apps, services, and systems of record to generate more intelligent triggers to respond to cloud system changes. Grok also aims to continue to invest in their learning technologies as the company looks for more ways to use the data businesses already collect to enhance the platform’s understanding of client environments.

“We have developed Grok to respond to the pressure DevOps has within businesses. We hope our solution can move the industry forward by reducing the cost of IT and giving more time back to DevOps to be proactive, instead of reactive. We hope to continue to empower organizations to focus on creating new value for their markets by relying on Grok to handle day-to-day operations,” Tarun shares on the future prospect of Grok.

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Company Name

Management

Brief

CloudHesive cloudhesive.com

Jim Walker CEO & Founder

CloudHesive provides cloud-based solutions through its consulting, managed DevOps, managed professional and managed security services with a focus on security, reliability, availability and scalability.

It helps enterprises to leverage the potential of DevOps.

Flux7 flux7.com

Aater Suleman Co-founder & CEO

Flux7 AWS partners provide AWS migration, AWS DevOps and other services such as IoT architecture and cloud.

Grok grokstream.com

Tarun Gangwani Head of Product

Grok is a machine intelligence-driven analytics and automation company, providing a leading AIOps solution for enterprise companies.

Kovair Software kovair.com

Bipin Shah Chairman and CEO

Kovair Software is a Silicon Valley based software Product Company specializing in the domain of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management – ALM solutions.

OpenMake Software openmakesoftware.com

Tracy Ragan CEO

OpenMake Software builds scalable Agile DevOps solutions that enable enterprises to solve continuous delivery problems.

Steve Green Devopsologist,

Ranger4 ranger4.com

Helen Beal Devopsologist,

Malcolm Namey

Ranger4 is Europe’s leading DevOps Evolution Consultancy and helping to deliver better software faster and more safely.

Sales Director

Sandhata sandhata.com

Srinivasa Alluri Chairman

Sandhata aims to provide meaningful business outcomes in every customer interaction and have the experience to do just that.

Sematext sematext.com

Otis Gospodnetic Founder & President

Sematext Group is a global products and services company that offers infrastructure and application performance monitoring and log management solutions.

Spotinst spotinst.com

Amiram Shachar CEO & Founder

Spotinst allows its clients to reliably run their production and mission-critical applications at a fraction of the computing price.

Thor Essman

Versent versent.com.au

Co-founder & CEO,

James Coxon Co-founder & CTO,

Eddie Smith Co-founder and CSO

Versent is changing the landscape of the enterprise digital economy by bringing a modern-day approach to a world of oldschool thinking.

CloudHesive: Enabling Companies to Adopt and Manage the Best Practices of DevOps

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orking from multiple offices and juggling from one time zone to another with continuous cultural and language differences can result in an operational nightmare for organizations.

Adequately leveraging the potential of DevOps can help transform this complex dynamic into a collaborative and productive environment. The DevOps market has continued to rise and mature in the recent past, wherein more and more enterprises are adopting these agile practices into their present infrastructure. It should come as no surprise that DevOps has turned out to be the most promising approach for businesses to have a distinct advantage in the market. One sector that has contributed to the rise of DevOps has been the growth of public cloud. This has paved the way for enterprises to shift their business focus more towards managing clouds instead of hosting them. One such fastest growing DevOps Solution Provider enterprise is CloudHesive.

CloudHesive provides cloud-based solutions through its consulting and managed services with a focus on security, reliability, availability, and scalability. They help companies reduce their operating costs and enhance productivity while improving their cloud security posture by migrating their mission-critical workloads to the cloud. CloudHesive also helps companies adopt and manage the best practices of DevOps. It is committed to the philosophy of bringing continuous improvement that facilitates success and security for its customers, as well as bringing the technology community together.

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Unrivaled Solutions and Services Partnering with some of the most reputable security and DevOps partners like Chef, Ansible and Octupus Deploy, CloudHesive helps its customer by leveraging the best practices of DevOps within Open Source and .Net environments. These partners have controls designed and formulated to increase the visibility of environment activity, the automation of application deployments, the automation of implementing a standard security foundation and provide 24*7 customer support. With CloudHesive’s proven security control plane, they ensure a protective wrap over a cloud or an onpremise environment. They realize that for a firm to be successful, they must be able to pass critical regulatory and third-party audits. It goes the distance to ensure that the cloud security controls are in place and always updated as well as reduces human error.

DevOps Solutions - A Never-Ending Process for Continual Improvement Businesses of all shapes and sizes are adopting DevOps tools and processes for efficient development and release of robust market-driven applications.

Agile and DevOps processes have time and again proven to be successful by laying down the groundwork for releasing applications safely and more frequently. This has allowed organizations to be more responsive to the changing business needs and provide better customer service. Being a Managed Service and Managed Security Provider, CloudHesive infuses its team into the enterprise workflows to work as a cohesive unit, enabling their customers to reap the benefits of

the cloud technology that provides superior automation, scalability, flexibility, and reliability for faster application delivery.

DevOps provides enterprises with endless opportunities including the increase in innovation, improved speed of deploying new features and functions, increases in security controls, reduction in human error, and sizable cost-savings. Customers prefer CloudHesive because they have the ability to enhance their customer’s teams with DevOps, cloud centric architecture, and security best practices expertise while reshaping the customers internal teams base of knowledge.

An Industry Veteran Leading the Way in Bringing Forward Innovation Jim Walker, CEO and Founder of CloudHesive, is the visionary with an extensive industry experience who has led the company from its very inception. Prior to the formation of CloudHesive, Jim worked for several distinguished SaaS and PaaS companies. Among them, he was most recently the Global Head of Cloud Operations and Security for Pegasystems, which is located in Cambridge Massachusetts. During his time at Pegasystems, Jim was a member of the founding team that incubated and grew the Pega Cloud service offering into a global solution.

It is also worth mentioning that Jim was the CTO of Arise Virtual Solutions, where he oversaw the security and core technology platform to help Arise grow into an international August 2017

”

The CloudHesive team helps our customers automate deployments, implement governance and increase their speed to innovation by deploying and managing our customers DevOps pipelines

Jim Walker CEO & Founder

contact center business process outsourcing (BPO) company. With over 25 years of both hands-on and managment experience, Jim has integrated all his industry knowledge into the business proceedings of CloudHesive to enhance its functioning and productivity.

Providing Optimum Benefits to its Clients CloudHesive’s possesses a team of experts who help companies to deploy mission-critical workloads onto a reliable platform to reduce operating costs, increase productivity and strengthen security. They help businesses thrive in their market by introducing them to the best cloud practices. With a vast client base from numerous industries, CloudHesive understands that the need for each customer differs from one another. For this, they not only provide expertise to migrate their customer out of its data center environment but also increase its capacity and presence globally. Some of the benefits enjoyed by CloudHesive’s customers: Ÿ Providing sound DevOps and cloud standards, processes and procedures. Ÿ Helping customers by managing large regulatory environments. Ÿ Wrapping both cloud and on-premise environment with proficient security controls and DevOps automation. Ÿ Providing the end to end management of our customer’s environments Owing CloudHesive’s Success to the Employees According to the CEO Jim Walker “Our employees are the foundation of our success, and we invest in them, so they

August 2017

”

can provide our customers with superior service. Every team member undergoes in-depth technical training and participates in partner events, community involvement and mentoring.”

CloudHesive has made sure from its beginning days to compile an expert team of dedicated engineers to architects, who can implement and manage the environment in the most efficient way possible. They infuse their experienced team of professionals into that of the customer to help them leverage the cloud through a formal advisory process.

Employees at CloudHesive, perform a detailed assessment of their client’s current environment, develop a comprehensive implementation plan, and architect the next generation of the application, infrastructure and security posture on AWS, Microsoft, SoftLayer or Google.

A Future of Continual Expansion CloudHesive has a specific and determined future aspiration of continuing its upward rise in Managed Services and DevOps practices. They are currently working towards expanding its DevOps and Cloud Orchestration platform, which will allow their customers to manage workloads seamlessly across multiple cloud vendors.

Additionally, CloudHesive is also expanding its reach into the Latin American market with the commencement of its new office in Argentina. They are providing an all new range of services in regards to developing customer cloud solutions, which include but not limited to IoT development, large scale content management, Secure Workspaces and next generation contact center solutions.

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Kovair Software: Integrated ALM and DevOps by Connecting Your Development Tools

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n Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software package offers numerous advantages to all developmentescalated organizations, for example, those that outline, manufacture, and sell software to clients and other thirdparties, or organizations that align inhouse IT groups to create Applications software for internal use by representatives.

With ALM software in place, organizations can improve profitability, cost-effectiveness, and quality, empowering them to address clients’ needs better and use imaginative advances that help new or remarkable inside business activities. And when it comes to ALM solutions, Kovair Software is renowned for providing innovative ALM tools integrations.

Based in Silicon Valley, Kovair is a long-established software company originally funded by Angels and VC in early 2000.

A One of its Kind Firm A decade since its inception, Kovair is running independently and controlled by private investors and management.

Its major product focus is on ALM Tools integrations and through its Omnibus Integration Bus capabilities, it has recently entered the growing

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domain of Intelligent DevOps Solution that is getting significant traction.

Providing clients with a choice to mix and blend various tools and technologies, Kovair ensures that their integrations always meet their project’s demands. Kovair claims that there is no other ALM tool apart from theirs, that has comprehensive built-in integration capabilities like their ALM Studio. With Kovair, many process capabilities can be implemented with their configurable process engine. The Kovair team prides themselves on their extensive traceability capabilities built into their ALM platform.

Serving the Market with Pride In the long run of ten years and counting, Kovair has created more than 70+ ALM tools integrations both for major ALM Vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, HP, Rally, CA and several Open source tools such as SVN, GIT, Gerrit, Jenkins and others. It was very natural for them to make an easy but a very strong entry into DevOps with a very comprehensive solution.

Their background in basic ALM Software Development tools along with Enterprise Class Workflow and Change Management capabilities coupled with the best-of-the-breed

popular Build, Test, Release and Deployment tools integrations gives them the unique advantages that they offer both on the Dev and Ops sides of DevOps. There are not many companies which can offer this unified single solution capabilities as they call “Single Click” Kovair DevOps Solution.

An Industry Veteran Leading from the Forefront Chairman and CEO of Kovair, Bipin Shah has been a veteran of Silicon Valley for over 3 decades and has worked both in the Semiconductor and Software domains. He has been VP of Global Operations for Altera – a major PLD- FPGA company – recently acquired by Intel, where he helped the company to grow operationally from zero to over $500M in revenue over a period of 11 years. He was then named President of Altera Japan where he grew Altera’s business in Japan from $55M to $120M in less than 3 years.

Prior to that, he started his chip career at Fairchild where over a period of 11 years, he held positions in Engineering, Quality/Reliability and Manufacturing Management.

His software career started with Kovair and since early 2005, he has transformed the company into an

August 2017

“Achieve DevOps capabilities with Kovair’s Single Click Intelligent DevOps

”

Bipin Shah Chairman & CEO

Integrated ALM solutions provider and a leading provider of integrations for major third-party development and other tools with Kovair’s trademark Omnibus Integration Platform.

with a different set of integrations that Kovair easily facilitates to get executed in a matter of days or even hours! Ÿ And finally, low implementation costs.

Bipin holds a BEE (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and a MSEE from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Believer of Open Communication For Kovair, the success starts with recruiting the best fresh talent and they have religiously done that with a college recruiting and training program. The management is focused on employee communication with customers and what the customers are asking for, which makes the entire organization customer-centric in their approach to the jobs.

The team is focused on open communication for product management ideas and inputs, and follow up through execution of these new ideas in a team environment with a focus on timely completion of tasks.

Providing Benefits Like No One Else Primary benefits for their clients or the differentiating factors for Kovair DevOps can be summarized as: Ÿ Ease and speed of implementation with off the shelf integrations of desired tool sets based on a chosen process or methodology. Ÿ A step-by-step approach to DevOps if the customer chooses for phased implementation over time. Ÿ Very cost-effective solution with a combination of existing customer owned tools, some additional new tools and about 50% open source tools that are virtually free. Ÿ Flexibility to make changes along the way based on the lessons learned with a set of tools and make changes

August 2017

Future Prospect Innovation driven Kovair aims to continue their focus on customer satisfaction. “Our future perspective is targeted towards continued innovation and customer successes with all levels of customers for helping them develop good products through our development tools. This is a vast market and continued introduction of new and innovative products is bound to bring success with our close dialog with customers and satisfying their needs ahead of the competitors!” explains Bipin.

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Editorial Talk

DevOps

-Bridging the G A P between Dev and Ops

F

or centuries, humans have had a propensity to pit two or more teams with distinctive functionalities against each other – even when they are on the same team. This dynamic can be witnessed even in traditional business enterprises, between software developers and operational staffers.

The rivalry between Dev and Ops has been prevalent for decades causing one of the most prominent challenges for organizations to manage their IT capabilities. Overcoming from this rift and identifying each other as partners rather than rivals, can be crucial for a business to attain success. But due to opposing priorities, a friction gets created when they are combined, making it even harder for dev and ops to communicate in an efficient manner.

Conflict between Development and Operations Although there isn’t any doubt concerning the various technical as well as business advantages that an organization can reap upon combining Dev and Ops, but they comprise of entirely unique goals, metrics, and approaches.

Development primarily lays focus on producing new systems and applications and ensures that customers get to use the same as fast as possible. On the contrary, operations look from a different aspect altogether; wherein they primarily focus on ensuring a speedy and bug-free stable system.

Additionally, both dev and ops strive towards achieving a similar goal of making their customers feel happy and satisfied, yet they utilize completely contradicting approaches to reach that purpose. On one hand, development aspires to impress its customers with their new enhancements.

Whereas on the other hand, the operational team wants its customer base to use a stable and tested system – free from bugs and operability inconveniences.

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August 2017

The Battle Scenario – Before and After the Advent of DevOps Before DevOps came onto the scene, both Development and Operations worked in an isolated manner. The only time they crossed-paths were during the release phase. The development team, already notified about the release date, intended to interject some new and additional features before the time of release. Whereas the operational team knew from beforehand whether the current release version had any new or additional features interjected. This way, before deploying the release to the customer’s site, the Ops team performed rigorous testing to be satisfied with its stability and operability and only then permitted its deployment.

The arrival of DevOps and its rise in adoption led to a paradigm shift from this culture. Developers now no longer need to wait for a release date to bring-forward new and enhanced features. Instead, they have the capability to release new features on a regular basis by using the concept of Continuous Integration and Delivery. This has prompted developers to emphasize that the operation team must manage this regular flow of new features imperatively before it gets deployed to the customer’s site. But this approach gave rise to a new problem, as Ops have to deal with a pipeline of releases at a regular interval due to this.

They now need to be extremely attentive and careful about the quality testing of the systems as the deployed builds on the customer site may or may not be entirely free from bugs.

The Resolution The most feasible and obvious solution to this opposing friction is the synchronization between Dev and Ops, popularly termed as DevOps. Coined by Patrick Debois, known as “the father of DevOps,” DevOps is an operational philosophy that helps to bridge the gap between Development and Operations by emphasizing upon integration, collaboration, and communication.

August 2017

It is the most salient methodology through which an organization can check and assure a balance between development and quality. In order to reach an equilibrium point in this resolution, both Dev and Ops need to embrace the DevOps methodologies by modifying their outlook and their way of working, as follows: From the Operations Perspective Ÿ Extensive monitoring of all running environments such

as staging or production, so as to react and prevent any issues from cropping up and spreading, respectively. Ÿ Operations need to be much more flexible in their approach in accepting regular or frequent changes. Ÿ Operations should facilitate an effective and healthy collaboration with the Development team.

From the Development Perspective. Ÿ Sound engagement needs to be performed to assess the

quality metrics that Ops emphasizes on, to track customer production systems and quality. Ÿ Dev need to be more involved with the testing of their own code in the production phase instead of leaving out from the field after writing the system or application code. Ÿ Developers should facilitate an effective and healthy collaboration with the Operations team.

Hence, it can be safely exclaimed that both Dev and Ops team need to change substantially in their functioning and outlook to successfully adopt the DevOps methodology.

Adapting to DevOps culture is by no means a silver bullet, as it brings with itself a considerable amount of changes.

But upon successful communication between developers and operators, an organization will be able to reap significant advantages through the same. The battle between Dev and Ops may continue for years, but DevOps has the distinct capability to bridge the gap between the two.

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OpenMake Software Helping Enterprises with Their Scalable Agile DevOps Solutions

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n today’s highly competitive business landscape, it has become an essential element for softwarepowered organizations to adapt to the changing trends to outrank your competition and thrive forward. One such powerful and an overarching trend we have been witnessing in the past couple of years is the rising adoption and maturity of DevOps practices. From its ground-level, a humble small-team beginning, DevOps has mushroomed to take the center stage in the software development field, showing absolutely no signs of leaving or slowing down. Large and small businesses are on the lookout for the best practices and solutions to scale DevOps across their entire organization. OpenMake Software is one such company which strives to dramatically solve customer problems with their scalable agile DevOps solutions.

Boasting a team of proficient software engineers – who are skilled at building scalable agile DevOps solutions – they are driven by the satisfaction of helping their customers radically accelerate software cycles from continuous build through continuous deployment. It’s highly automated and traceable build, package and deploy solution allows their customers to

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master Agile’s last mile. OpenMake Software understands the movement away from the legacy buying models and supports an open source solution, DeployHub.org, and a consumption based license for DeployHub Pro and Meister. OMS partners with RedHat, CloudBees and GitHub to provide their joint customers with a complete and continuous delivery solution.

Leading the Industry before DevOps came into Existence Back when tools like Continuous Integration, Agile, and DevOps were not being used; mainframe programmers adopted similar principles by using tools such as Endevor and ChangeMan. The CoFounders of OpenMake Software recognized a lack of these processes and tools on the distributed side of the house. This sparked the purpose of forming OpenMake Software, to provide tools and services that break down waterfall barriers to speed up the software release cycle on the opendistributed systems. Its products are as follows:OpenMake Meister – Offered as a build automation tool, thereby replacing manual one-off scripts with streamlined, accelerated and audited software builds. Unlike scripted

solutions, Meister scans source code, tracks and reports dependencies, and performs software builds incrementally. . Additionally, it accelerates builds using parallel processing for the fastest software builds possible.

DeployHub – Offered as an open source solution, it is an agentless Application Release Automation (ARA) solution that enables organizations to master agile’s last mile – the point where production deployments keep up with the cadence of agile development. An affordable alternative to traditional software deployment tools, it performs software delivery 12x faster than traditional modes at one-fifth of its cost.

DeployHub Pro – This is a professional upgrade that includes release management features for the enterprise. DeployHub Pro is sold to enterprise level development, testing and production teams that require a safe software delivery process.

Providing Optimum Customer Support with its Professional Group of Developers OpenMake Software has a group of software developers who truly love the DevOps industry and strives to provide August 2017

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We help enterprises to master agile’s last mile

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Tracy Ragan CEO

best-in-class solutions to its vast group of customers. Being an expert in working with customers to achieve the benefits of agile, their customers firmly believe that they can rely on OMS to provide them with an overall solution that can meet their unique needs. It is because of their professional team that enables them to offer the optimum level of customer care and support. OMS points out that “We have experts from both sides of DevOps, including the top experts in software builds and software releases. It is this combination that allows us to create DevOps tools that fit the needs of enterprises across the globe.”

Changing Vision into a Successful Reality An industry veteran in Agile DevOps implementation for large enterprises, Tracy Ragan is the CEO of OpenMake Software, having imparted her extensive knowledge and experience to lead the company to where it stands today.

She began her career in consultation in 1989 on Wall Street, wherein she specialized in accelerating release cycles through improved build and release practices.

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Preaching DevOps throughout her entire career, even before it was vogue, it was Tracy’s broad experience that contributed to the creation of OpenMake Meister – the first commercial build automation solution. She holds a Bachelor in Science Degree in both Business Administration and Computer Technology from the California State University in Pomona. An eloquent author and a reputed speaker at industrial conferences, which includes her 15 consecutive years of presentation at CA World, Tracy has also served on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors as an Add-in Provider Representative for 5 years.

A Future that Promises Success OpenMake Software is well-positioned to be a leader in the DevOps arena, especially around continuous deployment and Application Release Automation (ARA). According to them, “Our open source ARA solution is gaining community support and will elevate OpenMake Software as a leader in this DevOps specialty.” They believe that their company’s growth in the near future will be driven by the developer adoption of continuous deployment and the ease in which testing and production can repeat the developer defined deployment process. This will, in turn, allow the enterprise teams to finally master agile’s last mile – the point in which production has become as lean as development.

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Ranger4: A DevOps Evolution Expert Leading the Voyage

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he world is on the brink of the next major industrial revolution – the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While the first revolution made use of coal, water and steam energy to quicken and automate generation, the second harnessed the power of electricity for large-scale manufacturing. Then came the third one which utilized gadgets and IT to robotize generation. What’s more?

Expanding upon the third, we are here at a digital revolution fusing technologies to obscure the lines between the physical, digital and biological realms.

At an organizational level, keeping pace with the Fourth Industrial Revolution implies developing and deploying new digital services, enhancing operating efficiency, and setting up an advanced working model for IT. This means DevOps – a rising model of product delivery that encourages higher and quicker rates of progress through the optimization of development and delivery services.

With an award winning E3 suite of services, Europe’s leading DevOps Evolution Consultancy, Ranger4 is helping to deliver better software in a faster and safer way. Ranger4’s E3 suite makes ridiculously easy for users to Explore, Educate and Evolve while lowering costs and escalating profits through spectacular levels of employee

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engagement, organization and motivation.

A DevOps and Agile Transformation Specialist Today, most companies are adopting DevOps or thinking about it. However, Ranger4 way ahead of the league.

Ranger4 has found its niche in helping identify where, when and how users can start to make incremental and evolutionary change, incorporating DevOps principles and practices to maintain the momentum.

Being DevOps and Agile Evolution Specialist, Ranger4 is focused on cultural and organizational change to streamline interaction and processes of IT organizations. Its solutions help companies take the pain out of managing complex software environments, making it possible to focus on delivering innovation, fast, to its customers, and get the answers needed, imperatively, so issues can be fixed quickly and easily.

Three DevOps Thought Leaders came together to rule the market Malcolm Namey, Helen Beal and Steve Green – DevOpsologist™ joined hands and founded Ranger4.

Prior to Ranger4, Malcolm served the financial services markets in London and technology organizations.

Malcolm has a unique skill of visualizing the business value for new and emerging technologies, and he continually focuses on demonstrating the bridge between IT and business.

Using DevOps, he enables his clients to gain realization against business deliverables. Malcolm has a passion for collecting vinyl and an avid follower of musicians living the Rock’n Roll dream.

Being Head of DevOps, Helen has over two decades of experience working in the technology industry with a focus on the Software Development Lifecycle for a wealth of cross industry clients in the UK and abroad. Helen speaks at many DevOps events and delivers DevOps consulting, coaching, training, workshop facilitation and game leadership. She is Ranger4’s representative on the Board of Regents at the DevOps Institute and DevOps World Advisory Board. She has been also listed in TechBeacon’s 20 Influential Women in DevOps, PowerAdmin’s 51 DevOps Influencers to Start Following Today and DevOps.com’s Women in DevOps. Steve has 25 years’ experience in working with the organizations getting the best out of technology. In the UK and pan Europe, he has either started or helped run numerous businesses. He August 2017

“We believe change comes from within, so our tools help organizations move the needle on their DevOps maturity using their

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own resources Steve Green

Helen Beal

Malcolm Namey

DevOpsologist

Head of DevOps & DevOpsologist

Sales Director & DevOpsologist

has developed a razor-sharp focus on the commercial benefits of delivering better software in a faster and safer way, and is often called upon to help senior decisionmakers. Steve is a qualified ski instructor, keen trail runner and cyclist and is based in the French Alps.

Explore, Educate and Evolve Even though some vendors have a very “product specific” view of DevOps, what differentiates Ranger4 as an independent consultancy is its ability to draw a roadmap that concentrates on what clients need to achieve. Their Explore services quickly establish an accurate view of key stakeholders in getting the primary objectives fulfilled. The firm focuses on the commercial realities and benefits, and ensures that those objectives are at the heart of everything they design. Their Educate services guarantee engagement, organization and communication that bring everyone along on the journey. Finally, their Evolve services provide a consistent delivery of the roadmap with regular course checking, feedback and measurement.

Helping Clients Find the Key Inhibitor to Facilitate Change Often, the clients tussle with their cultural challenges while being a part of the change. Ranger4 helps them find the missing piece of the puzzle and the key inhibitor to make the change. It has developed a suite of tools like The Phoenix Project Game and training in partnership with The

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DevOps Institute to help clients tackle the problems around communication, collaboration, fear, blame, lack of transparency, bureaucracy that organizations regularly deal with. Moreover, Ranger4 has a strong commercial element to its approach that helps organizations to be value-focused and bridge businesses and the IT sector. It also helps customers build The DevOps LoopTM by employing DevOpsologists™ to make it possible for them to measure and track the cost of a feature or idea through the development and delivery cycle, and report on the real business value it delivers in real-time.

Leading the Market towards DevOps Tomorrow When asked about the role of their employees, Steve answered, “Our Rangers create the success. Winning IBM’s worldwide Beacon Award for Most Innovative DevOps Solution Provider in 2015 and being the winner of the worldwide DevOps Dozen in 2016 is a testament to the resolve and creativity of your typical Ranger. We thrive in a culture of collaboration, innovation, and delivery without fear to admit things change outside of our control and to adjust tactics and strategies accordingly.”

Ranger4 looks forward to continuing to lead the pack while innovating ways to ensure its customers feel that DevOps Utopia are within their reach. “Because if they are not delivering better software faster and safer than they were, their competitors will be,” concludes Steve.

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What Future Holds DevOps Forecast

for

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ith the implementation of modern DevOps practices, it’s important for IT companies to not to get left behind. In the year of 2016, DevOps was all about security, enhancements, and containerization. However, like every year, the trends have changed quite a lot for the year of 2017. Till date, the prime challenge for DevOps was in the understanding. According to some, it is a collection of concepts, for some, it is a movement. However, it is a combination of two terms, which are developments and operations.

DevOps is a new term, where professionals from operations and development departments participate in the entire service lifecycle which starts from design and development and ends in production support stage.

Additionally, it is characterized by autonomous teams and continuous learning environment. So, here we are listing out some of the key trends that we can see in the upcoming days.

Till date, organizations have experimented with DevOps in small projects. Though experts believe that large organizations will fully adopt DevOps in 2017, after ďŹ nally taking the center stage, it will help developers, QA, and testing professionals, business

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professionals, and operations personnel to collaborate in an enhanced way.

Nowadays, security is one of the prime concerns for most of the organizations. With more sophisticated attacks and smarter hackers, companies are now focusing on unifying deployment, continuous security, and operations efforts. So, user experience and advanced security measures will eventually go hand in hand in near future.

Recently, the market has become dynamic and larger organizations have legacy applications alongside micro services, on premise cloud infrastructure, which includes infrastructures, tools, applications, and processes. In that respect, DevOps can support anything. So, organizations who focus completely on software innovation and faster application updates, DevOps will be a great option.

With the increased use of DevOps, modular approaches to system building will increase. Gone are those days when IT companies created colossal products for their customers. Now they are opting to employ small teams to manage and accomplish individual applications. This may sound weird to some

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people, but companies that embrace the chaos to drive future growth will flourish eventually.

The idea of automation is not at all new. However, the ability to bring infrastructure easily and seamlessly is a new concept. Here enters DevOps (seriously, even in an article?), which helps to program infrastructure easily, so that teams can develop the software and operate its environment instantaneously. Soon companies will continue to push faster, software based methods when it comes to infrastructure.

DevOps reduces the time to deploy a feature to production. As this transformation happens, systems will be more risk tolerant. Any of the changes made are less likely to leave a negative impact on the system and the entire production time will reduce to few minutes, rather than weeks or days.

With each passing day, DevOps is eliminating the role of operations. Previously, a big monolithic system used to take years to overhaul.

Nowadays, the time to change or switch out the technology stack is taking only a few days in order to accomplish. One can expect to see more pronounced changes in how companies look at their legacy systems, and as a result, the role of operations will be eliminated completely by next few years.

DevOps ready tools are now seeing much more adaption and out of the box functionality, which has led to decreased traditional silos between developers and operations. With teams focusing more on continuous delivery and improvement, the accountability and ownership from developer teams to build and run their solutions increases.

The next trend to look for is big data and DevOps coming together in order to create predictive analysis throughout the delivery cycle. DevOps can automate processes and configuration. In these pipelines, if an organization suddenly starts creating a ton of data and applies machine learning to that, then the failure can be predicted easily and areas that need optimization can be identified faster.

Now organizations are emphasizing on shifting-left of more and more of their software delivery practices. As a part of the trend, which will continue to increase, activities that were traditionally done after deployment and production, or things that are typically done later in the development or release process, are now moving earlier to the pipeline.

So, here are few trends that will affect the industry to a large extent. However, one of the biggest trends of DevOps is not just a focus on engaging and implementing these practices in an organization, but a comprehensive adoption of the DevOps culture. Those enterprises that adopt the shared responsibilities, authorized autonomous teams, learning environments, and have the can do attitude where DevOps thrives will witness the benefits.

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Sematext: Helping Organizations to Perform Better

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rganizations nowadays use various forms of software that eventually leads to an increase in data and logs, which are extremely critical to monitor. Because of this, organizations end up paying high prices for licensing fees and ongoing operational inefficiencies. To tackle these prevalent issues – a globally distributed organization – Sematext enters the fray with its innovative cloud and on-premise solutions. They offer infrastructure and application performance monitoring and log management solutions - Sematext Cloud and Sematext Enterprise. In addition to the above, Sematext goes the distance to provide Search and Big Data consulting services. They also offer 24/7 production support and training for Apache Solr and Elasticsearch to their worldwide clients.

Computer Science from Middlebury College.

Helping Clients with PerformanceRelated Issues A decade ago, Sematext was started as a professional service organization.

Their service back then included consulting, support and training for Elasticsearch and Apache Solr. While dealing with massive clusters, and helping clients with performancerelated issues, the company found itself in a dire need of tools that were imperative with regards to Solr and Elasticsearch performance metrics. But due to a shortage of tools back then, they could only provide unified monitoring and log management solutions. This prompted Sematext to build its very own tools.

A Visionary who Led Sematext to Glory Otis Gospodnetić, Founder and President of Sematext group, is the visionary who led the company to its current glory. He is the author of several published books, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a proficient speaker at several industry events. As an active participant of Apache Software Foundation, he has significantly contributed to Apache Solr and Apache Lucene – a software library positioned at the core of Solr and Elasticsearch.

Eventually, Elasticsearch and ELK (aka Elastic Stack) became immensely popular among the DevOps circuit for building log indexing and searching functionality. Their Elastic Stack was seen and preferred by the masses as a cheaper alternative of Splunk.

Sematext already possessed a deep Elastic Stack expertise, and adding log management to the already existing infrastructure and application performance monitoring was the obvious next step for them. This was the cause behind Sematext ending up with Sematext Cloud, thereby offering an all-in-one unified monitoring and log management.

Prior to Sematext, Otis served at Thomson Reuters as a manager and held the chair of Senior Engineer of Search at Technorati and Wireless Generation. His educational resume includes a Bachelor’s Degree in

The Past is Always Tense; It’s about Making the Future Perfect DevOps teams of different organization tend to invest a lot of time and energy to automate the whole workflow, such as CI pipelines and automated

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deployment, as well as in monitoring operations. Improvements in applications require a consistent need to learn from past failures and strategies, to avoid any repetition of the same.

Sematext provides logging and monitoring tools to gain operational intelligence from development, staging and production environments. They realize that visibility of application and infrastructure metrics combined with logs is what helps an enterprise identify pre-existing and potential issues. It serves as the first step in each of its iteration to solve identified technical problems.

Helping DevOps Team Spend Less Time on Troubleshooting Sematext’s Cloud integration enables their customers to collect metrics, logs, and events across their entire stack.

They go beyond collecting metrics and detecting anomalies by uncovering applications’ slowest transactions, tracing communication between servers and applications, and others.

Sematext includes a fully-integrated Kibana and exposes the Elasticsearch API. It works smoothly with all standard logging facilities and agents – such as Logstash, Fluentd, Flume, Filebeat, etc. – and integrates the same within minutes. By enabling businesses to collect metrics, logs and events easily – their solution provides a fullstack of visibility through a single pane of glass and helps businesses to extract value from those accumulated data.

Sematext’s unified all-in-one monitoring and logging solution eliminates costly context-switching, which a person is forced into while August 2017

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We are agile and globally dispersed. Our search experts help businesses understand and turn mountains of operational data into practical and actionable business analytics

Otis Gospodnetić

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Founder & Presidentr

using separate monitoring and log management tools. This switch is not only tiresome for the person undertaking it, but also leads to inefficiency as it slows down troubleshooting and increases the time of recovery.

Organizations engaged with Sematext and its services reap its unparalleled benefits such as reduction in downtime and revenue loss. The company enables the DevOps teams from different organizations to spend less time on troubleshooting and more time on doing work that helps move the organization further.

Standing Tall Among the Competition Organizations nowadays firmly depend upon software; and with the presence of software, metrics and logs are bound to stay, making it highly imperative for enterprises to monitor these vital types of data. While vendors like Splunk or New Relic focus solely either on logs or performance monitoring, Sematext offers an efficient platform that eliminates the chasm between performance monitoring and logs.

Organizations that use multiple tools from multiple vendors ultimately have to pay a high price, both in licensing and inongoing operational inefficiencies. Sematext Cloud (SaaS) and Sematext Enterprise (on-premises) provide Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and Log Management in a single, unified solution. This enables the DevOps teams using Sematext to work more efficiently and troubleshoot faster than the traditional log management and monitoring software.

Where Employees are the Pillars of Success Sematext owes its proliferating success in transitioning from just a service business to a product and service business, to its team of experts and professionals. Unlike other firms that started building products without any August 2017

revenue behind its back, Sematext already had a very healthy professional service business in place, enabling them to choose the bootstrap route.

Otis Gospodnetić mentions that “For me as a founder, transitioning Sematext from a pure service business to a well-balanced products and services business was very interesting. It was a multi-year process that required a lot of focus, planning, patience, and juggling.”

This transition occurred at an individual level as well, with Sematext’s engineers who previously worked with only their consulting clientele, gradually adapting the roles of product engineers. This unique flexibility to simultaneously play multiple roles made it a possibility for them to shift towards a successful products and services company, without a hitch or a hurdle blocking their way.

Planning a Future that Brings-forward Success According to the company, organizations nowadays are beginning to realize the value of a unified log management, infrastructure, and application performance monitoring.

This is one of the main differentiators that Sematext brings to the table. With each passing day, the company is seeing an increase in adaption by smart organizations, which now realize the potential advantages of working with Sematext.

With advantages such as faster troubleshooting, shorter downtimes and making the lives easier for their customer’s DevOps teams, the company is destined to rise-up the ladder in the coming years.

In addition to their deployment in North America, the company has recently initiated Sematext Cloud in Europe and is expecting to see further increase in adaption across Europe by organizations that prefer or need to keep their data within the European Union.

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Spotinst: Helping Organizations to Run Mission-Critical Applications at 1/10 of its Standard Compute Price

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ith IT-enabled innovation becoming a competitive differentiator for almost all types and sizes of organization; agility in delivering IT systems and the ability to run them reliably in a cost-effective manner is critical. This importance has caused the rapid rise of Spotinst, a company that allows its clients to reliably run their production and mission-critical applications at a fraction of their overall computing price. They provide better predictability and high-availability in the Amazon EC2 Spot Market, Microsoft Low-priority VMs and Google Preemptible Vms. The Highly Respective Leader Spotinst was co-founded on February 2015 by CEO, Amiram Shachar; Chief Architect, Liran Polak; and CTO, Aharon Twizer. Before the formation of the company, Amiram was the Director of Architecture and Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms at Lycos Global Group. While working on a migration project from an onpremise to a public cloud environment, he recognized several ‘loopholes’ which he could leverage to achieve better and efficient performance, while gaining brilliant cost reduction from his cloud infrastructure. These unique ideas eventually gave birth to Spotinst.

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With a massive experience of more than nine years, Amiram led the first private cloud project for the Israeli army and transformed Israeli Defense Force completely, as a result.

Entering the DevOps Solutions Providers Segment The founding team of Spotinst, collectively boasts an unparalleled experience in the domain of infrastructure. It was more than a decade ago when the founders took their first step as young programmers through MAMRAM – the elite technology unit of the Israel Defense Forces. They were responsible for the management and operations of the military data-centers and virtualization systems. After their brief stint at IDF, Spotinst’s founders joined various leading companies in the industry, managing various DevOps and software engineering programs, while building and maintaining large scale cloud architectures. Simultaneously, the Spotinst team members received computer science degrees from various Israeli universities, while working under senior technology executives of the country’s leading high-tech companies. This super-efficient team of computer experts decided to dedicate their final project to the field of datacenter efficiencies and Amazon Spot

Instances utilization. Since then, the team has been busy helping customers to save up to ninety percent of their computing costs.

Standing Tall in the Crowd It doesn’t matter on which platform the client’s infrastructure runs, the company provides optimal framework for compute provisioning and costeffective utilization with products such as, Elastigroup, a software that intelligently facilitates the balance between On-Demand, Reserve, and Spot Instances in conjunction with making the right decisions to get the best balance between Cost and Performance. Additionally, it also provides high availability in Amazon Spot market, and Google Preemptible VMs . Thanks to its high scalability, it can automatically increase the number of instances of demand spikes in order to maintain performance and decrease capacity lulls to reduce costs.

Elastigroup is well-suited for simple web applications, containerized environments and as well as for complex legacy enterprise applications.

Spotinst also provides a cloud-agnostic Load Balancer that provides smarter, cheaper, and better traffic allocation across public and private clouds. It also brings together application load August 2017

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We believe that the Amazon

Spot market represents what we

refer to as the real cloud a dynamic environment that supports the balance between required resource availability and its price, considering

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supply and demand

Amiram Shachar CEO & Founder

balancing, traffic engineering, security and deep analytics capabilities.

In addition to that, Spotinst provides cross-cloud applications performance monitoring, called “Spectrum”, which enables real-time visibility, historical insights and event driven alerts on client’s data metrics.

Spotinst biggest bet for the next few years is it’s Serverless Compute platform called “Spotinst Functions”.A Multi Cloud Function as a service that runs customers’ code in response to events. Users only need to pay for the compute time that they consume at the most cost-effective price on earth at fifty to eighty percent less than regular Serverless pricing.

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A Fast-Moving Industry According to Spotinst, the DevOps industry moves at a lightning speed resulting in witnessing different DevOps reality within every three months. Each and every cloud providers are now pushing their various offerings to the limits; by adding new PaaS offering on a monthly basis, startups come with new tooling and paradigms, and the main challenge for companies in that eco-system is to keep their relevance over time. The biggest opportunities come from ‘loyal’ or ‘satisfied’ clients, as long as the company is close to its clients, listening to them and innovating on their behalf is the biggest opportunity an organization can wish for.

Future Path Spotinst views the future of Cloud and IT in the Serverless domain. The organization believes, that the future of cloud would be much more flat, distributed, and elastic agnostic to vendors. It is targeting to become “The Cloud of Clouds”, a virtual layer that allows users to run anything, anywhere, and anytime with the same experience. When it comes to the product roadmap, the company has recently launched its Spotinst Functions service that allows users to run Serverless applications at fifty to eighty percent less of the standard pricing. The new service, which is currently at beta stage, is platform-agnostic and supports the three major public cloud providers,and soon will work with IBM and Oracle.

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CXO Standpoint

About the Author Carl McCauley is the CEO of 360factors. He is a highly successful executive with a technology background and a unique combination of sales, marketing, product management, development, operations and business experience with proven success in high-growth enterprise software companies.

Carl has some great achievements to his credit. He was working as VP of Sales at MetricStream for seven years where he took them from the startup phase to become an industry leader, growing sales at an average rate of 50% annually and becoming recognized as a Leader in Gartner's GRC Magic Quadrant. And as SVP of Sales at Zycus, Carl helped Zycus become recognized as an industry leader in procurement source-topay solutions and a leader in Gartner's Strategic Sourcing Magic Quadrant.

Carl enjoys providing solutions that help companies manage and optimize their business processes.

Whether meeting their regulatory compliance requirements, managing the risks associated with their business, or interacting with their suppliers and customers, the best performing companies continuously focus on optimizing and improving the efďŹ ciency of their processes and procedures.

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August 2017

Oil and Gas Industry in the Midst of Strictest Regulations

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ew standards, highly publicized spill incidents, public debates on drilling practices and the general sentiment that oil and gas companies contribute greatly to environmental issues around the globe are causing the industry to contend with some of the strictest regulations in the world. As regulations continue to grow in complexity and reach, the increased enforcement and improved coordination among regulators increases the risk of noncompliance on top of a smorgasbord of enterprise risks inherent to oil and gas companies.

The regulatory and reporting landscape today is particularly complex for oil and gas companies. The unpredictable nature of emerging regulations has given birth to growing industry concerns about effectively managing risks in face of changing rules and regulations. Regulatory pressures touch on every part of the business and with the growing number of laws today, the cost of noncompliance can be significant. Organizations are faced with the challenge of effectively managing OSHA, BSEE, USCG, DOT, EPA, Conflict Minerals, NI-52109, COBIT, ISO and compliance mandates such as Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Amendments to EU Directives, Dodd-Frank Act Section 1504, SEC Rule 13(q), SOX, FCPA and other compliance programs based on federal and state regulations.

A single oil and gas company can face multiple offshore and onshore regulations and standards – from exploration to distribution. This could impact multiple sites and various compliance departments and could get highly complex, increasing the risk factor. In order to comply with this added complexity, companies need solution that enables them to figure out which regulations apply to which facility and assets and links and fosters communication across all facilities and assets within the business in real time.

Noncompliance can result in production delays, cost overruns, unintentional loss of data, and even physical security threats to company assets as a result of malicious activity. The cost of noncompliance and its effect on the business requires oil and gas companies to rethink their approach to regulatory compliance. Companies now need tools that allow them to respond with agility to market demands while keeping them in compliance and subsequently reducing exposure to noncompliance and risk. They also need talent, organizational framework, systems, processes, and attitudes that are sufficiently flexible and innovative in an evolving and uncertain marketplace.

360factors, Inc., a leading cloud-based Enterprise Risk and Compliance Management technology and services company has been helping oil and gas companies since past several years in navigating their way through a changing regulatory environment, managing risk and improving performance to increase operational excellence, sustainability and margins.

360factors provides robust, well-managed regulatory risk and compliance program that is supported by all levels of the organization.

We work with oil and gas companies to understand their business risks and develop strategies to manage and leverage on them. Our key experts understand business operations and processes, and they use their expertise to help clients define and develop their strategies, and risk management and mitigation techniques.

We help companies to reduce operational costs and optimize business processes. We help our clients integrate their initiatives in one platform, allowing them to adopt a systematic and organized approach to their cost reduction and process improvement initiatives. Our regulatory risk and compliance management solution, powered by artificial intelligence, breaks down silos and reduces costs incurred by multiple installations, minimizing the complexity for functional departments and compliance initiatives while amplifying the overall productivity of the entire team.

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Versent: The Perfect Cloud Transformation Partner

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he enterprise technology industry know as “ICT” is operating years behind the consumer technology we know and use every day. It is nearly impossible to get a “done done” outcome in the Enterprise IT, thanks to its heavy dependence on people, manual process, outsourcing and consumption of proprietary software. In response to this market need Versent was formed in 2014 to change how business gets done and to disrupt the enterprise IT consulting market. Today, it aims to break the tripartite relationship between the corporate IT, IT consulting firms and Enterprise Software companies. The ethos of the organization centers around Discipline + Automation = Transformation.

Versents delivery capability comprises small teams of senior craftsmen, with the right tools, and the discipline “to automate everything” to deliver outcomes.

Team of Highly Skilled Craftsmen Versent was formed by three cofounders named Thor Essman, James Coxon, and Eddie Smith.

Thor is the CEO of the company, with more than twenty years of experience in strategic and operational leadership.

He combines a great passion for disruptive technology with extensive expertise in the cultural change and

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helps to bring together business, technology, and financial interests in order to deliver noticeable outcomes.

With the focus on getting it done, James is now the CTO of Versent. He delivers scalable cloud infrastructure for multi-channel digital assets while ensuing cultural change is expertly managed, and continuous improvement strategies are implemented across all business engagements.

Eddie, CSO of Versent is a respected industry expert, with more than twenty years of experience in the field of digital security. He offers strategic governance, architecture, and design advice across enterprise digital solution, with a complete focus on identity and access management, compliance, risks and security services.

Entering the Ever-Growing Market of DevOps The company believes that experience comes from knowledge, and the desire to improve the standard model. Based on this belief, the three founders of Versent developed a robust methodology that would set them apart from the rest. The organization’s formula of discipline, automation, and transformation is applied at every step of the way, and its fixed price, fixed outcome approach to IT services provides the customer a much-needed

transparency and security that often can be lacking in the IT industry.

Versent also believes that without embracing a fully automated approach to business and technology, large organizations will continue to be weighed down by legacy decision.

Standing Tall Amongst the Competition Versent consists of six different pillars such as DevOps/Automation, Cloud, Identity, API and Micro Services, Big Insights, Managed Services. All these services are designed, delivered, and managed with keeping security as the first principle, then full stack automation as the catalyst for quality, time, and cost. The organization builds for disruption, which is the key differentiator of Versent. Enterprises such as those in the sectors of banking and airlines are now the road to digitally transforming their organizations. Often, they are less agile and take ages to roll out such projects in part, thanks to the large size of the organization. Here, customization, differentiation, and speed works great and are the key factors for Versent when it comes to winning over customers.

Future Roadmap According to the organization, not following the trends and sticking to the discipline is the key to success. Versent August 2017

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Thor Essman Co-founder & CEO

Eddie Smith Co-founder & CSO

James Coxon Co-founder & CTO

believes tools and new processes will come and go, but the discipline and culture will survive. In order to fully automate, a level of discipline needs to be nonnegotiable.

However, at the same point of time, the exibility to support change, even fundamental ones like a cloud, or machine learning, AI, or whatever comes next is paramount. It also thinks that change is the only constant, so it needs to build for change.

Achieving success in the digital economy requires not only experience, but also insight and the courage to be different

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In the next two years, Versent has three goals, which include solidifying its home market, that is Australia and predominant partner in security, DevOps, clouds, API, and data. Expand and replicate the model outside Australia.

Grow its subscription business more than forty percent of revenue.

As a subsequent goal Versent is looking to create more than 1000 new jobs for high skilled technology labor in Australia, as a part of a bigger change of shifting the industry back onshore and being part of bringing 100,000 new jobs to Australia over the next two decades.

Employees are the Pillars When it comes to employees, Versent treats them as a family. For years the company has watched as enterprises have let the technology gap widen between it and everyone who use at home. It brings craftsmanship back to technology, and provide an environment where diversity is expected, accepted, and appreciated in all forms. A challenging environment that is best in the industry and employees can freely test the boundaries and can help to spread the movement to others. Till date, the Australian company has been able to attract some of the best employees in the industry, mostly by protecting the culture and fostering strong, pragmatic disciplines. Versent encourages its employees to be innovative, and it continually invests in initiatives, like meetups, tech sessions, and partner hack.

August 2017

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