The 10 most valuable aws solution providers dec 2017

www.insightssuccess.com MM 2017 2017 DECEMBER

The way of business solutions

The10 Most Valuable

Trends to Watch Trends in Cloud Technology that are pulling Technocrat’s Attention

Energy E cient Technology

AWS Solution Providers

2017

JT Giri

CEO & Co-founder

Green Cloud Computing: Saving Energy through Technology

nClouds

Technical Innovator, Delivering Results-Driven DevOps and Cloud Solutions

Editorial

O

Quintessential Facets and Matchless Services are Flourishing AWS’s Popularity

rganizations cannot achieve their utmost objectives without having a robust and quintessential infrastructure. Just like having a car and few gallon of fuel does not drive you to reach to your destination, for that one vital thing you require is well-built road i.e., Infrastructure. In almost every business verticals good infrastructure plays a pivotal role in shaping the company’s fortunes. With the growing adaptability of IT and its applications across the globe, a good IT infrastructure is essential for the smooth execution of operations.

Amazon Web Services is one such provider which has built a strong repute of being an exemplary provider of IT infrastructure needs. The quintessential facets of AWS have been the prime reason behind its burgeoning popularity over the past decade. Its ability to provide computing power, storage options, networking and databases with on-demand and flexible payments options have already pulled more than one million worldwide customers towards it. From data warehousing to varied deployments tools, directories to content delivery, over 50 services are available in just a few mouse clicks with AWS. Their innovative services are quick to provision without upfront capital expense, allowing enterprises, start-ups, SMB and customers in the public sector enterprises to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly in the changing business circumstances.

AWS’s classic features such as a wide range of server configurations, database engines, encryption and powerful big data tools assist businesses to stay focused on their core business without worrying about IT infrastructure. Its deep visibility into compliance and governance and enhanced cloud security plays a crucial part in today’s IT infrastructure landscape. This is the reason millions of customers are currently leveraging on AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability. And these facets and their matchless services have been the prime reason behind its flourishing popularity which makes AWS the leader in cloud space. With the on-going trends and research analysis, one can rightly assume that the AWS will further consolidate its position and will attain far greater heights in the coming times.

Ashwini Deshmukh

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Jason Mendes Managing Editor Ashwini Deshmukh Co-Editors John Smith Piyush Rishi Contributors Shweta Priyadarshini Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Alex Noel Picture Editor Rahul Kavaneter Art Editor Shweta Shinde Business Development Manager Mary D’souza Josh Gray Marketing Manager Chris Clarke Business Development Executives Jennifer Winget, Brad Lee, Sophie Smith, Mary D’Souza Research Analyst David Circulation Manager Robert Database Management Steve Technology Consultant Swapnil Patil sales@insightssuccess.com

December, 2017 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Cover Story nClouds: Technical Innovator, Delivering Results-Driven DevOps and Cloud Solutions

CONTE

NTS

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Apps in Focus Business Applications for Virtual and Mixed Reality

32

Tech Insider Cloud KickStart – Accelerating Speed to Value in the Oracle Cloud

42

Pioneer Vista Surng Ahead of the Trend: How to spot an opportunity and grow

20 Cloudreach:

Articles

An Innovative and Intelligent Cloud Solution Provider

38 Energy Efď€ cient Technology Green Cloud Computing: Saving Energy through Technology

24 Eko Communications: Achieving Big Milestones

by Delivering Cutting-edge Mobile Communication Platform

22 Trends to Watch Trends in Cloud Technology that are pulling Technocrat’s Attention

26

30 KnackForge: Riding on the Robust Pillars of People, Process and Tools to attain the Zenith of Success

Editorial Talk DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops

36 OpenVPN: An Innovative Networking Software Solution Provider

Security, Reliability, Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness Driving AWS popularity to the Next-Level

A

mazon Web Service is a known name in the computing world that does not requires any introduction.

Being a market leader in cloud computing space, it has built a strong repute by providing a plethora of high end qualitative services that are not only technologically advanced but cost-effective as well. Due to its ability to quickly scale their products to as many users as possible, organizations all across the globe are using it to pace their IT operations for faster growth. Scalability, security, reliability and adaptability of AWS's are prompting businesses to look inquisitively for a cloud solution that can trigger a much faster momentum to be on the bleeding edge in this hypercompetitive business era. Therefore, we are bringing some of the top-notch AWS solution providers from across the world in this issue of “The 10 Most Valuable AWS Solution Providers 2017”.

In this issue, on the cover, we have nClouds Inc.; it is a DevOps and cloud consultancy solution provider that has specialization in modern infrastructures, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS). They provide expert services for DevOps (continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines, containers, micro services), managed services (cloud infrastructures, change management), cloud migration, plus world-class 24/7 support.

OpenVPN Inc. delivers cutting-edge networking software solutions for small businesses. Cloudreach is a growing IT company having specialization in varied cloud solutions for all business types and provides operational support of various leading cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions. Eko Communications is a leading mobile startup company of the Southeast Asia region that provides innovative mobile communication platform to revolutionize the way people work.

KnackForge provides a wide range of cloud computing, web application development, cross-platform mobile app development, consulting services, staff augmentation, and many more services to their clients. Apart from all these prominent firms, we have also enlisted Trility Consulting, Wylei, Telehouse, ANS, and OpsRamp Inc. which also have proved their superiority with leading-edge cloud services.

Our in-house editors have brought some thought-provoking articles on AWS: “Green Cloud Computing: Saving Energy through Technology”, “DevOps – Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops”, and “Trends in Cloud Technology that are pulling Technocrat’s Attention” which you will find fascinating.

We have also included insider’s opinion regarding current industry scenario by some of the renowned names from the industry. Juliana Button and Adam Sheppard gave valuable insights on topics “Cloud KickStart – Accelerating Speed to Value in the Oracle Cloud” and “Business Applications for Virtual and Mixed Reality” respectively. Mohsin Memon shared his views on “Surfing Ahead of the Trend: How to spot an opportunity and grow”.

So, do flip the pages of our magazine, and enjoy reading. We hope that this issue will encounter you with many captivating things which you are looking for in AWS Industry.

Cover Story

JT Giri CEO & Co-founder

Technical Innovator, Delivering Results-Driven DevOps and Cloud Solutions

Cover Story

D

evOps is the sizzling buzzword on the tip of nearly every tongue in the IT world and extending into the business domain. The promise of faster product delivery with improved quality and increased employee productivity in this neck-to-neck, hypercompetitive business era, is what’s fascinating IT and business leaders. Behind the buzz is a wave of successes with a range of organizations, from “unicorns” to “workhorses”, and startups to large enterprises. DevOps is now viewed as a major enabler of digital transformation, with the primary outcome to deliver improved customer value.

According to a leading technology firm, DevOps adoption has increased from 66 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2016 and among larger enterprises its adoption is even higher, at 81 percent. The latest numbers for 2017 indicate that 90 percent of organizations implemented, are currently implementing, or planning to implement DevOps. Market research specialists forecast that the global DevOps market will grow at a substantial 19% CAGR during 20162020 periods. But what’s truly exciting is the intersection of DevOps and cloud – particularly public cloud, which is an ideal platform for DevOps. Product teams, historically having innovation and execution throttled due to infrastructure, can now provision their own infrastructure on demand, using full automation.

This market growth has caused a surge in demand for cutting-edge DevOps solution providers. nClouds is one such organization, growing from a startup in 2012 to a credentialed, award-winning firm delivering technically innovative and successful solutions to a long list of clients. nClouds is a DevOps and cloud consultancy and solution provider with deep expertise in modern infrastructures, particularly Amazon

Web Services (AWS). They provide expert services for DevOps (continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines, containers, microservices), managed services (cloud infrastructures, change management), cloud migration, plus world-class 24/7 support.

Starting with Technical Leadership at the Top JT Giri is the CEO and Co-founder of

“It's about clients' business results, so success for us is when one of our own clients says, 'Our clients now trust us to deliver quality products fast and iteratively – we're innovators!'

”

nClouds. He’s an astute, technicallysavvy entrepreneur who’s made it nClouds' mission to help organizations create sustainable systems that empower the business to deliver innovation faster and predictably. Giri has deep and broad experience of more than a decade as a DevOps consultant, and previously held roles as a network engineer, systems architect, and systems admin. His expertise lies in cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, agile methodologies, and popular tools

and practices for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Giri’s technical and analytical skills have assisted nClouds in solving complex problems for numerous Silicon Valley-based startups and enterprise organizations. And his vision, diligence and contagious passion for solving technical challenges have enabled him to build a highly-skilled and experienced team at nClouds, and an enviable list of exciting clients. Now, Giri and his team have made nClouds an indispensable DevOps and cloud partner in solving their clients’ toughest challenges.

Services that Enable Digital Transformation nClouds understands the importance of infrastructure automation, high availability and a secure architecture for its clients in this fast-changing, tech-savvy world. They’ve crafted innovative techniques and processes, and built a proven track record of delivering comprehensive DevOps and cloud transformation solutions for businesses in various industries.

DevOps Consulting: nClouds works closely with client teams to build a DevOps culture that yields better collaboration among stakeholders and increased transparency and feedback across the software delivery lifecycle.

This results in faster software delivery with fewer defects, and improved predictability. nClouds are experts at applying automation to software delivery to build, manage and support CI/CD pipelines, and design and execute container and microservices strategies. Their DevOps services have helped clients to improve idea-to-cash, sales velocity, customer experience, competitiveness – and have been credited with helping numerous startups build the innovation culture that helped them get acquired.

Managed Services: nClouds leverages the team's experience and credentials to take care of their clients’

Cover Story

nClouds also offers nOps, an awardwinning SaaS offering for modern change management for cloud that features workflows, change management database (CMDB), service catalogs, and DevOps tools integrations. It was shaped directly by customers to help organizations go faster with control, manage cloud costs proactively, improve security and compliance, and prevent and remediate incidents. nOps gives teams instant visibility to change requests and any delta in their infrastructure. Customers use it to automate change authorization to handle most requests instantly, while customizing exception handling with easy-to-create workflows that can be integrated with DevOps tools like Slack, HipChat, and JIRA. nClouds calls it “change management at the speed of DevOps” since the tool achieves an improbable balance of control without sacrificing DevOps speed.

Cloud Migration: Migrating existing apps to cloud can be a tedious and complex task, and needs the right tools and skills. nClouds has a battery of experienced professionals to move applications to AWS for improved reliability and scalability. Based on the company’s experience with 250-plus AWS deployments, they can optimize the clients’ use of AWS to minimize cloud computing costs.

24x7 Support: The skilled and diligent support team at nClouds provides world-class technical support to its clients. The quality and value of this

support can be gauged by the fact that 95% of nClouds’ consulting services clients utilize nClouds’ 24x7 support. nClouds can take full responsibility for their clients’ infrastructure performance with on-call, SLA-level support for DevOps pipelines and cloud infrastructure.

Fast Path to Achievements Deep on technical skills, nClouds has earned certifications and competencies from Amazon, including AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, AWS Managed Service Partner, and AWS DevOps Competency. nClouds’ experience includes more than 10 years of DevOps automation and AWS implementations. To date it has 250plus successful AWS DevOps implementations, over 500 deployed pipelines, and manages more than

‘‘

For technical talent, we have to be on the

bleeding-edge. Our

clients expect us to be some of the smartest people in the room

‘‘

infrastructure needs so that clients can focus on their business, leveraging the advantages of on-demand, affordable infrastructure services to innovate faster and grow. nClouds builds, automates and manages cloud infrastructure, and implements change management processes, systems and service catalog management, as well.

They are able to manage the entire IT infrastructure from alerts to server uptime and downtime.

when it comes to getting it done technically.

10,000 servers for various clients.

Most recently nClouds was recognized as one of the “20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers - 2017” and “20 Most Promising ITSM Solution Providers – 2017,” by a leading business technology publication, representing the input of a distinguished panel of CEOs, CIOs, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and editors.

Along with all these achievements, nClouds is a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), and teams with AWS on technical, business, and go-to-market initiatives.

Clients’ Perspectives on nClouds nClouds has more than 100 enthusiastic clients, including some of the coolest companies in Silicon Valley. Their customer base spans the US, Europe and Asia, and includes startups and enterprises, alike. Its clients are delighted and satisfied with nClouds’ services, and include recognized brands like Avaya, Informatica, Sony (division), LendingHome, TuneIn, Prodea, and many more.

“The partnership with nClouds has helped TuneIn implement a DevOps culture. With that culture comes speed ... it helps us innovate faster, helps us align groups and everyone’s marching to one goal. So, for us, it’s velocity.”

– Jose Panlilio, Manager, Technical Operations, TuneIn “I cannot say enough about the nClouds team. Their work and efforts are tremendous, and they take great care of our environment. In nClouds, we found the next level of innovation, experience and ability to adopt new technologies.” – Marc Goodell, VP Environments & Infrastructure, 6Connex “nOps gives us instant visibility into changes in our AWS infrastructure. As we transitioned to a new, more secure and scalable AWS infrastructure

“

“

Cover Story

AWS's decade of experience in complex cloud environments is generating awesome innovation. We, along with our clients, are achieving real success partnering with AWS.

designed by our nClouds team, nOps provided daily alerts about changes and identified issues that we needed to address as we prepared for millions more users. Now, we've integrated nOps into our workflows.” – Gabriel Adauto, Director of Engineering, Learning Games, Motion Math Representative Client Results with nClouds Ÿ Achieved 10x faster product delivery speed, from ideation to rolling-out new features (idea-tocash). Ÿ Migrated a major app from singletenant, on-premises to multi-tenant, public cloud, reducing end-client onboarding from months to hours. Ÿ Created the ability for client’s Sales staff to self-provision test-drive environments for product offerings with a single click, improving customer and developer experience and accelerating sales velocity. Ÿ Modernized traditional apps by adding self-healing, auto-scaling, and rolling deployment capabilities. Ÿ Improved client and end-user confidence in iterative development, driven by innovation in quality and feedback. Ÿ Helped create a blameless IT culture, enabled by feedback and consistency across development, test and production environments. Ÿ Integrated security across the stack making it more than a checkbox. Ÿ Identified nearly $1 million in annualized savings by implementing modern change management process.

The “Special Sauce” in nClouds’ Success Building and feeding the right technical team. nClouds believes in hiring, retaining and incentivizing

technical talent. An engineering-led organization, the company has assembled a highly-credentialed, deeply-skilled team with a diverse set of talents – engineers, architects, developers, SREs, sysadmins, and project managers among its think tank.

The experienced team thrives on challenges from technically advanced projects, and is always motivated and energized to solve complex problems for clients.

Great clients and a collaborative engagement model. nClouds also credits its success to an exceptional group of clients, ranging from Silicon Valley-based startups to large enterprises. The common thread is that clients are looking to innovate faster and improve business agility. They see DevOps and cloud as integral to the solution, and trust nClouds’ experience. nClouds typically engages as an extension of the clients’ teams, with nClouds team members embedded and participating in client standups and connected via modern collaboration tools, like Slack. For most clients, nClouds provides front-line, 24/7 support for their DevOps and cloud infrastructure.

as a SaaS offering, started as an inhouse change management tool developed and shared by nClouds services teams on client engagements.

Perspective on AWS Market nClouds points to AWS's incredible momentum, fueled by a decade of experience in complex, production cloud environments, massive customer base, and global partner network. All this makes a powerful ecosystem that is delivering unparalleled innovation and a continuous barrage of rich new AWS features, products and services.

Services like Amazon ECS and EKS accelerate containerization, and AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway make it easy to build and maintain serverless deployments. For nClouds and their clients, it's an exciting place to be.

What’s Next for nClouds nClouds is continuing to make deep, technical know-how the focus of its business model. Credentials, competencies and reusable assets help scale the business, provide depth to source the best teams to tackle clients’ most complex challenges, and ensure the teams are leveraging best practices and efficiencies in delivering solutions.

Sharing knowledge, applying best Based on market direction, the nClouds practices. nClouds has a passion for team sees huge opportunity in helping knowledge-sharing, with two main enterprise organizations migrate objectives: to grow skills continuously, existing workloads to cloud, as well as and to capture and codify the team’s in a continued focus on enabling digital experience into reusable assets to transformation with DevOps and achieve better efficiency, best modern infrastructures. practices, and client success. Skills development includes industry certifications, training, and a common knowledge database. Applied best practices include shared processes, methods, services, APIs, and tools. As an example, nOps, which is now available commercially from nClouds

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Company Name

Management

Brief

ANS ans.co.uk

Paul Sweeney Executive Chairman

ANS is an award-winning cloud services provider committed to helping organizations to become cloud enabled through cloud ready networks and platforms.

Cloudreach cloudreach.com

Pontus Noren Co-founder & Director

Cloudreach is a growing IT company having specialization in varied cloud solutions for all business types and provides operational support of various leading cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions.

Eko Communications ekoapp.com

Korawad Chearavanont CEO

Eko Communications is a leading mobile startup company of the Southeast Asia region that provides cutting-edge mobile communication platform to revolutionize the way people work.

KnackForge knackforge.com

Jeff Strout CEO

KnackForge is an award winning multinational software company that provides wide range of cloud computing, web application development, cross-platform mobile app development, consulting services, staff augmentation, and many more services to their clients.

nClouds Inc. nclouds.com

JT Giri Co-founder & CEO

nClouds is a DevOps and cloud consultancy solution provider that has specialization in modern infrastructures, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS).

OpenVPN Inc. openvpn.net

Francis Dinha Co-founder & CEO

OpenVPN delivers cutting-edge networking software solutions for small businesses.

OpsRamp Inc. opsramp.com

Varma Kunaparaju Co-founder & CEO

OpsRamp is a leading IT company that has specialization in IT Operations, Hybrid Management, SaaS, Cloud Management, DevOps and more.

Telehouse telehouse.net

Ken Sakai Managing Director

Telehouse is a leading global provider of data centre services.

Trility Consulting trility.io

Matthew D Edwards President & CEO

Trility Consulting is a solution focused company that has expertise in cloud architecture, migration and management, devops, application development, cyber security and more.

Wylei wylei.com

Meg Columbia-Walsh CEO

Wylei is a leading innovator in the cloud-based machine learning and marketing automation space, powered by minds from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and CMU.

Apps in Focus

V

irtual and Mixed Reality technologies are stirring up quite a bit of excitement these days. Many investment firms and analysts say that Virtual Reality is the next big tech revolution after mobile, and predictions for the industry’s growth ranges from $70B to $150B by 2020.

Virtual Reality (VR) refers to a completely immersed experience where you can’t see or interact with the world around you. It typically doesn’t let you interact with others, though some social experiences are now being developed for VR. Mixed Reality (MR) are experiences that let you place virtual content on top of the real world and interact with it as though it were a tangible object, creating a blend of the physical and digital world.

Traditionally, the development of these technologies has been driven by military and training applications.

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More recently, VR and MR is gaining attention from various industries and it is an exciting time for companies and organizations that are looking for an opportunity to translate business solutions into an immersive media format. New applications are surfacing across an array of verticals: Healthcare: Today, doctors often carry paperwork and consult charts in order to assess their patients. With MR, physicians and nurses could access this information digitally and hands-free, allowing them to share it with fellow staff or even consult doctors across the country.

Education: With VR, complex systems could be visualized in three dimensions. Teachers can use virtual displays to show students how blood flows through the heart or take students on a field trip to a South American rainforest. VR could also allow realistic, complex training simulations that take minimal resources to create.

Engineering: There are numerous potential applications for MR and VR in engineering, especially with remote collaboration. Oil rigs, for example, require constant monitoring, but it’s not always possible to assign expert technicians to every location. Equipped with an MR headset, a maintenance worker could be instructed by someone on the other side of the world to conduct repairs properly. Architectural and design projects could also benefit from MR where multiple people could manipulate and shape objects within a shared environment.

As new technologies, VR and MR require a different approach. For any company who wishes to incorporate these new technologies into their processes, the following considerations are important to keep in mind: Comfort and Safety Most VR platforms require you to wear something on your face. This is a very December 2017

December 2017

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intimate way to connect to technology compared to what most people are used to, which is a screen they can keep at a distance. Thus, ensuring a comfortable, enjoyable VR experience is important for your comfort and safety.

VR and MR Do Not Replace Existing Workflows It can be tempting to consider VR a quick solution to problem solving. However, it’s important to remember that VR and MR are not about replacing existing workflows, but enhancing them. Companies should carefully consider their workflows and identify where MR or VR can be added as a discrete, important part of the workflow.

Choosing the Right Agency to Work With Designing for VR and MR is not a simple task. It’s unlike any other popular software design from the last 2030 years and requires an unusual skillset. Designers must think about the logistics of creating a 3D object; adding different behaviors and interactions to it that match people’s expectations of how the object would behave in the real world; and finally adding in digital properties such as the ability to resize, annotate, and transform it. In this environment, drawing on a combination of skills in gaming and cinema are key in conjunction with the ability to apply these skillsets to enterprise business problem solving.

Right now people are focused on moving from web to mobile, but the big question is whether VR technology will become as commonplace as smartphones. Broader adoption will probably come in the next three to five years, driven primarily by the entertainment and media landscape. This means that finding ways to effectively integrate VR and AR into a business and operations context will require creativity to design solutions and a willingness to experiment.

VR represents a real opportunity to improve the quality of human experience in two ways. First, integrating it into highly visual and hands-on remote collaboration processes can be a multiplier for human productivity. It can remove the need to be physically present, but offers more direct interactivity than teleconferencing or email. By improving the efficiency of communicating information, it can reduce time spent on extraneous workflow and processes.

Second, VR and MR can be used to help people understand complex data in an intuitive way. Imagine if FedEx could visualize all of its operations around the world, and how quickly they could identify areas for improvement for transportation and logistics.

This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as Virtual and Mixed Reality is concerned. Over the next few years, VR and MR will continue to evolve, changing the landscape of digital media as it finds its way into the hands of more and more users. To remain innovative and relevant to their consumers, companies should pay close attention to this space and begin exploring its potential to benefit their business today.

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December 2017

Pontus Noren Co-founder & Director

Cloudreach: An Innovative and Intelligent Cloud Solution Provider

C

loud technology has made it possible for everyone to innovate rapidly, in diverse ways, and at a far lesser cost than ever before. When everything is revolving around internet and mobility, it's not hard to predict that whoever makes the most of cloud technology will have a leading-edge in their respective business domain.

Cloudreach is a company that has expertise in providing exemplary cloud services to their clients. We have talked with Pontus Noren, Co-founder and Director of Cloudreach to find some valuable insights regarding: Cloudreach’s contribution towards AWS, his company’s successful journey since inception and more.

Tell us about your journey since inception of the company?

In 2009, Cloudreach was just two guys with a great idea and a lot of passion, talking in a pub in London. Having repeatedly witnessed how much time and money was being wasted on replacing or updating aging physical IT

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resources, James Monico and I wanted to enable organizations to innovate and become digital revolutionaries. Seeing that an intelligent approach to the way organizations deploy cloud was the future, we wanted to contribute to the acceleration of cloud adoption to allow businesses to turn their attention back to the “why” of what they do, rather than the “how”. Eight years on and we are helping some of the largest enterprises in the world to realize the benefits of cloud. We now have over 400 employees across 18 offices.

What are the major contributing factors behind your company’s success?

We “Keep It Cloudy” by staying true to our company values and understand that supporting each other goes a long way. Cloudreach are strong believers in the quality and personalization of the customer experience, and great people are the foundation of our business, and key to everything we do. Our company has a mixture of cloudy characters, and that diversity and individuality is definitely a contributing factor behind our success.

December 2017

“Cloud Technology has the potential to transform any business, and we have the solution.”

What’s an example of a company you worked with on AWS? True to Cloudreach’s company mission to enable innovation, The Economist was able to scale, improve the quality and availability of its infrastructure environment, rapidly deliver five new functionalities for their digital estate, and reduce the total cost of their infrastructure and operations. Cloudreach assisted The Economist “to realize a new way of procuring and consuming IT.” How do you see the following concerns; Cloud Security, Cloud Gaming and the impact of AWS on the gaming Industry?

Cloud security, as provided by the major providers is now a reason to use the cloud, not something to be feared. There is wide recognition that one cannot compete with Microsoft, Google or AWS when it comes to security, due to a mix of scale, talent attraction and technology leadership. A single organization might attain 1-2 externally vetted audit certifications - a major hyperscale cloud vendor might have as many as 30. Be honest, could you attract the finest MIT or Cambridge security professors to work for you? They can.

When it comes to gaming, we see no major difference in security requirements. Whilst the major platforms are common targets for hackers, so are almost all other major web platforms. There is of course a lot of sensitive user data and potentially payment infrastructure - but that also applies to many websites. The advent of GDPR will force smarter thinking around the handling of such data.

What does the future hold for AWS? The pace of innovation is fast - this is one of the things we love about public cloud. The competitive desire and drive to move further up the stack and offer solutions which make companies’ life easier and more effective – allowing them to focus on business value, not ‘IT’, was very apparent at re:Invent 2017.

We’re really excited about what the future holds. AWS shows no signs of slowing down, and we expect significant further disruption as cloud becomes the dominant IT platform of choice. More generally, in terms of trends affecting the cloud computing industry over the next few years, we expect Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to be huge, along with serverless development and compute power moving to the edge (also known as Fog Computing in some circles).

How do you see yourself and the company in the future ahead?

We have exciting goals for 2018. We will continue to scale the company organically (growing by another 100%), and inorganically, acquiring new capabilities and setting foot into new geographies as we go. Our partnerships with the hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google will strengthen further - these cloud platforms underpin everything we do and have done since we started the business in 2009.

Our ultimate goal is to be the #1 software-enabled services company globally, and we won’t get there without the efforts of all our fantastic cloudy people!

Google have long held the dominant position in the gaming space, in part due to a mixture of infrastructure performance and developers favoring the ease of working within a GAE environment. AWS is chasing hard into this space with offerings like GameLift and Cognito, and we expect to see notable penetration into this vertical in the next few years.

December 2017

21

Trends to Watch

in Cloud

technology that are pulling technocrat’s attention

22

December 2017

E

xperts believe that the market is set to enter into the second wave of cloud technology. Amazon started the first wave of cloud computing in 2006 and since then cloud computing and the enterprises been in this business have seen a surge in the cloud service demand from all across the globe. There are plethora of technical advancements has happened in cloud industry which is driving cloud computing industry towards an upwards growth trajectory.

Cloud Containers are in Demand Cloud container is one of the latest buzzword in the global IT world in general and security in particular. Even the world’s premier IT firms are benefitting and using cloud containers in full fledge mode due to advantages of easy management and migration of software code in an efficient way. Many organizations are using it to enable portability between cloud services from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure as it has the potential to enhance their DevOps strategies for software production. Many vendors are also supporting Openshift, Cloudfoundry, and other open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) systems. But companies also need to grapple with the new set of challenges like security, monitoring, storage and networking concerns that may arise as containers are deployed largely in production.

Surge in the Demand of Hybrid Cloud Technology To move all the mission critical data and application to cloud is not an easy decision to take for any higher management authority, especially at a time when competition is at peak and a small blunder can take a huge toll on company’s future plans. For smaller companies and startups it is much easy to move on to cloud, since the data and application amount is not that huge and the IT infrastructure is also not that much complex as compared with large enterprises. But bigger enterprises find it extremely difficult to shift their whole on-premise IT operations to fully on the cloud. Big organizations always play safe but they also understand the benefits of clouds which it brings to any organizations. Therefore, they prefer to partially move some of their IT operation on the cloud environment and remaining operations get executed from on-premise software and that makes the whole IT infrastructure environment a complex one.

But with the rapid advancement in hybrid cloud technology, this concern has fixed. New cloud software has sprouted up in the market that has the potential to integrate different technology into a cohesive system and gives the power to the employees to use their software remotely, on-premise or even allow it to run as a fully-hosted service with enhanced December 2017

user experience that too at reduced operation cost. These facets are pulling enterprises towards hybrid cloud. In 2016, adoption rate of hybrid cloud rose from 58% to 71% yearover-year and will continue to maintain its momentum in the near future as well.

Hyperconvergence Infrastructure is Gaining Popularity Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions offers pre-integrated compute, storage and networking resources that help organizations get their cloud implementations running faster. HCI solution also have the potential to deliver enhanced data protection, increased scalability, ease of management with cost saving. Due to its capability to easily launch new cloud services for enterprises that easily want to package and migrate new workloads, it is gaining prominence in the cloud technology space.

Organizations across the globe consider HCI as the foundation for their cloud environment, particularly for new workloads that demand rapid and automated transitions with minimal risk. Many technocrats believe that 100 HCI boxes can make a big pool of computing, networking and storage devises within a control of a single management tool. It also cut deployment down time to a matter of minutes. This particular model is helping companies to build private cloud that operate like public cloud.

SaaS on the Rise Businesses across the world invest heavily on IT software, hardware and people to orchestrate smooth execution of their IT operations. But all these resources: money, time and complex software up gradations and maintenance comes with a huge price tag and complexity. Improvements in cloud hardware technology have brought one awesome service in the form of SaaS that has the potential to cut operating costs without reducing the overall profitability and productivity. It has the potential to replace on-premise software and promises to deliver improved solutions without engaging in time-consuming IT deployment operations. It also eliminates the need of manual software upgrade and maintenance resulting into more time and budget for IT teams to focus on innovation. These are the reasons more and more companies are now considering SaaS as the integral part of their business process. Cisco report predicts that SaaS will account for 60% of all cloudbased workloads in the near future—a 12% increase over 2017 predictions.

New innovation and advancements in cloud technology would further lead to increased productivity, improved business relationships, easier collaboration, and reduced operating costs which would unsurprisingly lead to an even larger number of organizations moving towards cloud in the near future.

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Korawad Chearavanont CEO & Founder

Eko Communications: Achieving Big Milestones by Delivering Cutting-edge Mobile Communication Platform

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o dream big is not an easy task, it needs courage. To follow that dream is even more difficult which needs diligence, willingness to learn and adaptability, and to transform those dreams into reality requires persistence. The right blend of these traits in the right way always leads towards humongous success and immense recognition. Eko Communications is one such firm that has imbibed these core values in its work culture.

And due to these, in a very short span of time, Eko Communications has seen tremendous growth and is moving ahead with light fastening speed. Today, their mobile first platform is bringing teams together and has achieved a praiseworthy milestone of connecting over 2,00,000 users in real-time(with more than 10 million messages sent) through Eko’s communication platform till date.

Eko Communications is a leading mobile startup company of the Southeast Asia region. With the mission to make the lives of workers better, Eko Communications was founded in 2012. They have built an advanced communication platform that contains a wide range of communicative and

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collaborative features which empowers people with their job. The core objective of their services is to unlock the true potential of cloud and mobile technology to revolutionize the way people work.

They have an expertise in delivering cutting-edge mobile communication and collaborative solution for organizations, to increase the job productivity and employee efficiency. Their communication services primarily focus on workers whose job does not requires them to sit behind a computer all the day, instead ready to perform their task on-the-go, from anywhere at any time with the help of mobile phone and cloud technology.

Their mobile application allows staff, managers, and executives to engage in a variety of ways. The application provide numerous services like 1-1 chat, group chats, voice calls, video calls, file sharing, voice messages, polls, and broadcasts. These telecommunication services bring teams together and empower them with tools for more efficient communication.

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“Efficient and leading-edge mobile communication platform has the potential to revolutionize the way people work”

Eko Communications telecommunication platform is built to provide smart workflow for business process improvements. Every company has some sort of predefined task, approval process, document submission, report generation, task management and more. With Eko’s smart workflow, an organization can ensure business processes move more smoothly, where employees have the full liberty to work even from a remote location. Thus it offers flexibility and also saves time for employees in a most secure and customized fashion.

Today, Eko Communications is moving on the path to success, but it has not been easy, since the start of their journey. The Eko team has faced many challenges. One of the biggest was finding the right talent and training them up for different departments in a balanced fashion to meet their growing customer base demands. But the hunger to grow further, led them to move one notch higher each time when they encountered challenges. The firm is continuously growing year-over-year and is regularly competing with giants like Microsoft and Google and is achieving very remarkable results as well. Praise from prominent clients and recognition from industry veterans itself tell their success story.

“With Eko, we are sure that our guests are having a great experience — from the very first moment they check in. Eko guarantees that our staff reacts fast and professionally to all our guests needs.”— Markus Schneider, General Manager at U Sathorn Hotel “At TM, we’ve created an amazing internal communication application powered by Eko and it has revolutionized the way we do work. It has transformed our communications enabling faster decision making, faster escalation and instant problem solving amongst staff. There is only one word for it – Revolutionary” Izlyn Ramli, Vice President, Group Brand & Communications Telekom Malaysia • A prominent business magazine has listed Eko Communications in the list of top 25 Amazon solution provider for July 2017 edition.

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• Frost & Sullivan recognized it as the ‘Most Innovative Enterprise Messaging Service Provider for the Year 2016.’

Young and Passionate Architect of Eko Communications Korawad Chearavanont is the CEO & Founder of Eko Communications. Born and raised in Bangkok, Korawad started working for Eko since the age of 16, and eventually dropped out of Columbia University to work at Eko for full time. He is leading the firm with great zeal and passion and as a result of this, Eko Communications is able to fetch many eminent clients whose combined market capitalization amount worth over US$50 billion. He also helped the company to raise over US$9 million money for business expansion. His leadership and business acumen have been praised by many. In the recent times, Forbes magazine has featured Korawad in their Asia’s 30 under 30 lists of young entrepreneurs that are making a huge mark in the industry.

Eko’s view on Current Industry Scenario AWS has been a primary driver of innovation in the software space since its inception. Eko predicts that AWS will continue to build much more innovative applications in the future, and will provide efficient services to their AWS customers for revolutionary changes across a variety of industries, specifically with services like AI, speech & object recognition, and server-less computing.

Eko Communications also praises its association with Amazon which has helped to educate clients in the region about the benefits of cloud computing and to alleviate any fears, so that they can best leverage software like Eko. Future Prospective Eko Communications has very ambitious plans for the upcoming year. They are looking for business expansion in Europe and North America. With a series B round of financing and adding more innovative and interesting features for the mobile communication platform, they are hopeful to take the company fortune to a new level in the near future.

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Editorial Talk

DevOps

-Bridging the G A P between Dev and Ops

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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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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.

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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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Jeff Strout CEO

KnackForge: Riding on the Robust Pillars of People, Process and Tools to attain the Zenith of Success

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he growth of AWS is nothing less than phenomenal.

There was a time when AWS was launched as a medium to buy space for computers. Now AWS transact business worth over 16 billion annually. AWS, of course, had the advantage of a big head start in the cloud market. They began offering cloud infrastructure services like storage and compute over a decade ago, long before the competition actually started off on the ground. But it is the quality and effectiveness of their services that are triggering AWS towards upwards trajectory. Even as the other companies like Google and Microsoft have begun to pay much closer attention to cloud market, AWS has maintained its massive lead in terms of total market share. One emerging cloud computing company that has placed its bet on AWS for its future growth is KnackForge.

KnackForge is a US-based award winning multinational company that provides exemplary staff augmentation and software consulting services around AWS. They assist entrepreneurs, SMB’s and enterprises to focus on their main business goals and visions. By forging long-term

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partnerships with their clients, KnackForge help companies free up resources, control costs, and access the right development talent. They provides wide range of services include cloud computing and infrastructure, web application development, cross-platform mobile app development, staff augmentation and dedicated teams, consulting services, enterprise data warehouse and data mining.

AWS has been their platform of choice since the formation of KnackForge. They have helped multiple companies make the transition to AWS from their traditional data centers. They don’t just ‘lift and shift’ the applications to the Cloud but also look for opportunities to refactor and even re-write the code to maximize the potential of the cloud.

Mission and the brief Journey since Inception Their mission is to align their client’s business goals with the work they provide. KnackForge mean every word when they say “Your Voice is Our Voice; Your Goals are Our

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“Your Voice is Our Voice; Your Goals are Our Goals” Goals”. Their client varies from small business to big enterprises, but whatever size of the client, their mission is to align themselves with the needs of the clients.

KnackForge’s journey was started in 2011; after a couple of strategic acquisitions, they are now grown to a multinational company with offices in Tyler (Texas), Dallas (Texas) and Chennai (India). Their headquarters is in Tyler, a small town in East Texas with a population of approx.

1,05,000 people. By serving clients across three continents, they cherish the values and hard work that has made this country great.

Accomplishments in the Recent Times KanckForge has received multiple awards over the years, and has been recently shortlisted among the “20 Most Promising AWS Solution Providers 2017” by one of the leading technology magazine. The organization believes their biggest achievement is intrinsically tied with the success of its client. For them, their client’s growth is the real accomplishment, which they feel proud of.

Leading Light of KnackForge Jeff Strout is the CEO of KnackForge. He is an inspirational figure for its employees. People revered him due to the hard work and efforts he put to grow the company. He has vast experience in leading large enterprises and is using that experience along with sharp business acumen to lead Knackforge. Though based in Tyler, he spends a major portion of his time at client locations or at the Chennai office. His ‘client first’ approach is what the company strives for.

Contributing in Client Growth with Cutting-edge AWS Services Having evolved alongside Amazon over the years, KanckForge helped many of its clients to reduce overhead and improve reliability with AWS. In terms of reporting, KnackForge leverages AWS CloudWatch to provide monitoring for application. They commonly integrate the following technology into their services: Amazon API Gateway, EC2, RDS, Redshift, S3, ElastiCache, IAM, SES, and CloudWatch. Their AWS development services are leveraged by many startups, small businesses, and large enterprises to launch applications quickly, scale rapidly, and December 2017

enjoy high performance at a controlled cost.

KanckForge sees Challenges as an Opportunity Rather than Obstacle AWS is all about automation that includes the elimination of humans from the equation. Some jobs and tasks will fall aside in the future. More than on-premise jobs, it will affect how outsourcing would be done in the future. KnackForge see this as an opportunity rather than a challenge. Be it AI or any other automation, KnackForge want to be on the bleeding edge of technology so that they can continue to make a positive difference; not only to the client but also to the community as a whole.

Factors Behind Company’s Success KnackForge puts special emphasis on three vital elements people, processes, and tools to define every engagement that they employ with their clients. They inject this formula in service delivery which encompasses DevOps and designthinking which assist companies to control costs, and provide them access to the right development talent.

The technical teams in India along with business analyst team in the USA, who also have great communication skills together, form an impeccable combination to improve the processes and technologies of Small- and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) by leveraging solutions provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

CEO’s Take on Cloud Gaming and Cloud Security The Opportunities in Cloud Gaming on AWS are immense.

I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS corners the market. We want to be a part of the growth and we are all well equipped to do so; be it gaming or other emerging technologies like Block Chain. Cloud Security is also an interesting topic.

Having been in the industry for 25+ years I can safely say that AWS does a much better job at security than individual datacenters could ever do!

Bet on AWS’s for Future Growth Being a multinational company with an aim to evolve along with the industry helps them to keeps their flexibility and agility trait intact. KnackForge has placed its bets on AWS’s growth and feel confident about the future growth. They believe there is an exciting times ahead!

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Tech Insider

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o be competitive, organizations are looking to use technology to drive innovation into their products and services, and simultaneously deliver efficiencies. The Cloud promises to be an enabler for business transformation - providing the agility for organisations to rapidly learn and adapt with less risk of failure, and at lower cost. Cost is a consideration but more than that, it provides an opportunity to reduce waste and improve efficiencies.

Matt Wright, CTO, Rubicon Red, says “Digital transformation presents a significant opportunity for our customers in terms of driving innovation and accelerating time to business value. As organizations adopt new technologies and move to blended solutions comprising SaaS, private cloud and on-premise apps, integration plays a critical role.”

Rubicon Red, a globally recognized and awarded thought leader in Oracle middleware, recommends a phased approach to help organizations modernize their IT environments, migrating from largely on-premise systems, to hybrid cloud environments. Through a phased approach, Oracle Middleware customers can get the combined the benefits of Cloud plus DevOps to upgrade their environments, adopt cloud, streamline development processes, and concurrently minimize risk and cost.

Matt says, “We can help customers migrate from Oracle SOA 11g to SOA 12c, establish a cloud platform to seamlessly run Oracle SOA 12c on the Cloud, optimize their integrations, and drive further innovation through new integrations, SaaS extensions, new processes or mobile channels.”

The Best Recipe: Cloud + DevOps Moving Oracle Middleware development to the cloud (lift and shift) is a natural first step, and when coupled with a DevOps strategy means organizations can streamline their development processes. “Organizations that fully embrace the cloud for Dev and Test are experiencing more than 30 percent time savings upon maturing their DevOps capabilities,” says Matt.

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When it comes to running Oracle Middleware in the Cloud, customers have a couple of options. Oracle Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides the breadth and depth of functionality to rapidly build and deploy rich applications and extend Oracle Cloud SaaS apps and integrate with existing business-critical IT systems. SOA Cloud Service and Integration Cloud Service are the ideal approach for Oracle middleware customers to migrate their integrations to the cloud. Alternatively, customers could select an Infrastructure as a Service provider and install the Oracle SOA Suite.

To unlock the commercial and speed to market benefits of developing in the cloud, the process of taking code developed and tested in the cloud and deploying it into production needs to be frictionless. The key pre-requisites to achieving this are having a standardized and automated process for building and deploying code across all environments.

This is where Rubicon Red MyST, the end-to-end DevOps solution for Oracle Middleware, comes into it’s own for provisioning, configuration and release automation across cloud and on-premise, irrespective of your cloud provider. “MyST allows you to easily configure an Oracle SOA Cloud Service to replicate your production environment or provision and configure a Middleware as a Service on top of an existing IaaS provider – as well as fully automate the build out of your on-premise production environments,” assures Matt. Further, “MyST allows clients to establish a single integrated process for automating the promotion of the Oracle Middleware platform configurations and application deployment through each and every phase of the software delivery lifecycle - from development and testing to production, both in the cloud and on-premise.”

“Combining cloud-based development with DevOps is the perfect combination – reducing development time, whilst concurrently minimizing risk and cost,” says Matt. He goes on to share a great example of Cloud plus DevOps at an Australian Oil and Gas company. “Using MyST, they can provision a new Dev/Test environment on the cloud in less than 60 minutes, whereas previously it would take 4-8 weeks to provision a new environment, manually. And, using the MyST release automation capabilities, they’ve slashed release time from 4-8 hours to ~15 minutes.”

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About the Author Juliana Button is a passionate tech marketer, Manager - Marketing & Events at Rubicon Red. Prior to this, she was Director Product Management, Oracle Corporation, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Cloud Platform, working at Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores and in Australia.

Juliana Bu on Manager - Marke ng & Events Rubicon Red

Leveraging the cloud provides faster project start up time and improves developer productivity, giving them the agility and efficiency to rapidly deliver on new projects.

Accelerate Speed to Value through Oracle Cloud KickStart Matt emphasizes that the potential for business innovation through cloud is unprecedented and recommends that while a phased approach is best to migrate existing systems and bed down hybrid cloud infrastructure, organizations must, in parallel, begin to evaluate and prototype solutions that will drive the next wave of innovation. “With Oracle Cloud, continually evolving cloud services open the door to new business opportunities with disruptive cloud innovations using social and mobile services, big data, content collaboration, and the Internet of Things.”

Through their Oracle Cloud KickStart program, Rubicon Red provides a rapid on-ramp to Oracle Cloud. “Using our unique blend of Oracle expertise, best practices and agile development methodologies, our Cloud KickStart gives you everything you need to qualify, quantify and prove your transformation use-case with Oracle Cloud in just two-weeks – it is the best way to quickly get the green light on your next business transformation project,” concludes Matt.

A 2013 Survey by Evans Data Cloud Development Survey, found that cloud platforms reduce overall development time by an average of 11.6 percent, 38 percent cited savings in the 11 to 20 percent range, whilst 10% had experienced more than more than 30 percent in time savings.

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December 2017

Francis Dinha CEO & Co-founder

OpenVPN: An Innovative Networking Software Solution Provider “

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inancing” and “Human Capital” are the most vital aspects for any company, if financing is like the fuel than human capital is like the engine that accelerates and moves business towards the growth trajectory. If any organizations have these two things in abundance then every milestone can be achievable, even if in the first instance it looks impossible. Along with these, perseverance, overcoming obstacles by finding solutions, and focused approach towards unified goals are the traits that outshine an organization with other. OpenVPN Inc. is one such firm that is riding on the success trajectory with having these vital values at its core.

OpenVPN is a leading IT company based in the Pleasanton, California and has gained prominence for its innovative networking software. They provide cutting-edge networking software that are secure, reliable and scalable. OpenVPN is also credited for being the architect of open source Virtual Private Network (OpenVPN) software. Their networking products not only fulfill the requirements of the traditional virtual private network (VPN) market, but also address the demands of the next generation of VPN service. The soaring popularity of their networking application can be

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estimated from the fact that, every month OpenVPN’s website attracts more than 2,50,000 new SMB users, prospects, and customers towards their products.

With the mission of “Connecting your world securely”, they built up their flagship product known as OpenVPN. It is an award winning open source VPN product and has established itself as a de-facto standard in the open source networking space, with over 50 million downloads since inception. The organization believes that every person in the world should get access to safe, secure and scalable network and hence they crafted their products for wide range of Operating system platforms ranging from Windows, MAC, Linux, Android, and iOS. OpenVPN also provides server services like OpenVPN server on cloud, OpenVPN server as virtual appliance, OpenVPN server as software packages, and OpenVPN as a service (Private Tunnel), that cater the market demands for remote secure access, access control, and cyber security targeting businesses of all size across the globe.

Their OpenVPN enterprise edition brings plethora of features with enhanced user experience and is very simple

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“ It takes 3 things to build a successful business: Vision, Capital, and People (VCP). When your business is not profitable, time is your enemy and when your business is profitable - time is your friend ” to deploy and manage. Clients can avail the benefits of enterprise edition on an annual subscription basis based on the number of connected devices they have. The flexible pricing model allowed their business to grow quickly and has given them the ability to invest in product enhancements, network operations, customer support, business development, and marketing.

Recognitions that signifies the worth of their products • Lifehacker.com rated OpenVPN the best VPN tool.

• InfoWorld recognize OpenVPN as the best open source security software.

Beliefs that Shaped the Company The organization also believes that innovative ideas takes birth only in a free and liberated mind and if the employees work together, it can bring unimaginable results. Therefore, OpenVPN have no hierarchy system among its different grade pay employees and it assists employees to freely discuss any idea, problem or solution with their colleagues.

The sense of autonomy and flexibility help their employees to become more creative.

Driving Force behind OpenVPN Technologies Today, Francis Dinha, CEO and Co-founder of OpenVPN Inc., is a known face in the business world and is living an abundant life, but it wasn’t smooth sailing for him to reach the top of this pinnacle. Being born in Iraq, at the time of complete anarchy and dictatorship, he was faced many hardships. There was a time, when he was forced to sell cigarettes on the streets of Baghdad so his family could eat, and when he was finally able to escape the regime - he immigrated to Sweden where he worked as a dishwasher to make ends meet while he attended classes to learn the language. He believes education is the strongest weapon for change and transformation. Even during the tough times, he never compromised his education and continued it along while doing tough jobs like washing dishes.

receiving his Ph.D. when he got a job offer from Ericsson.

He considers it a pivotal moment and a turning point in his professional career. More than three decades of vast technical experience along with the passion to deliver comprehensive networking software to the world led to the inception of OpenVPN. Dinha’s expertise in product road maps, strategic planning, market positioning, business development, and growth strategies has helped the company grow. He is known for his leadership and entrepreneurial acumen and has received recognition for his contributions in the technical sector.

Francis is associated with the Forbes Technology Council and has contributed a number of articles about important topics like cyber security - educating individuals and businesses about protecting against cyber threats. He’s often asked to share his knowledge on private internet, cyber security, VPN (virtual private network) and the impact internet service providers will have on the future of our privacy with outlets like CNBC and BuzzFeed.

Road Ahead Innovation at its core, OpenVPN will continue its momentum of delivering leading-edge networking software for scalable and secure communication to connect every device securely through the ubiquitous internet. Francis, the CEO has a vision for the future progression of the company through a developed roadmap, great team, and the right financial resources - goals he believes can be achieved. “I think what sets successful people apart is their ability to find a way to get things done – just because something’s never been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be. It can – but only when someone is not willing to take ‘no’for an answer,” says Francis.

His quest for learning continues and with traits like diligence, integrity, and passion to make it big in life. Those characteristics led him to pursue a Master’s of Science in Computer Engineering. He was just shy of a year of

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Green

Energy Efcient Technology

Cloud Comput Saving Energy through Technology

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he rapid expansion in data centers, due to the exponential growth of the cloud computing has caused the dramatic increase in energy consumption and its effect on the environment in terms of the carbon footprints. To reduce the power consumption, it is required to develop some energy efficient solutions. The Green Computing is the practice of executing policies and the procedures to improve efficiency of the computing resources in such a way as to reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact of their utilization. Green Cloud Architecture is rising from these trends leading, not only to energy efficiency, but also a carbon emission aware concept. In order to reduce energy consumption, a greener environment needs to be built.

Among all industries, the information communication technology (ICT) industry is arguably responsible for a larger portion of the worldwide growth in energy consumption. The goal of green cloud computing is to promote the recyclability or biodegradability of defunct products and factory waste by reducing the use of hazardous materials and maximizing the energy efficiency during the product's lifetime.

Energy to be saved The objective is to reduce power consumption of the data center. It offers the features like online monitoring, live virtual machine migration, and optimization of Virtual Machine Placement. Through this proposed Green Cloud Architecture, energy up to 27% can be saved. The need to manage multiple applications in a data center creates the challenge of on-demand resource provisioning and allocation in response to time-varying workloads. Data center resources are statically possessed to applications, based on the peak load characteristics, in order to provide performance guarantees and to maintain the isolation.

Energy-efficient resource management has been first introduced in the context of battery fed mobile devices, where energy consumption has to be reduced in order to improve the battery lifetime. Techniques which are developed for mobile devices also can be applied or adapted for servers and data centers; this kind of systems requires specific methods.

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The primary method is to consolidate the Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling technique in an efficient way to maximize the resource utilization and to minimize energy consumption of the datacenters which will result in the reduced carbon footprints and thus will help more in achieving the Green Computing.

The Green Benefits Cloud computing is the way to save money and energy for the business. Users emphasize Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and can improve their manageability and facilitate the maintenance of the resources. It means that benefit of business enterprises implicates to avoid spending on software and infrastructure resources, and allow business clients to focus on earning money rather than being weighted down with infrastructure concerns. Therefore, operating this model allows reducing the consummation of the power energy without spending money on running the servers. Moreover, with no servers to repair, the absence of hardware to upgrade and no software to install, labor costs are also reduced.

With SaaS software accesses usually through a browser-based client, i.e., it can run on virtually any authorized computer, making desktop and laptop resources easily replaceable. Thus, when the user also saves on the support, it doubles the impact and in fact increases green role in business. The employees can work remotely, traveling and moving from one place to another because they have fast access to the internet and the ability to use all the services at hand, on the other hand, it reduces the consumption of fossil fuels and the harmful pollution that results from vehicle emissions as well.

The reduction of energy and power consumption has become a first-order objective in the design of modern computing systems. The roots of energy-efficient computing, practices can be traced back to 1992, when the U.S. environmental protection agency had launched Energy Star, a voluntary labeling program which was designed to identify and promote the energy-efficient products in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. Computers and monitors were the first labeled products. This has led to the widespread adoption of the sleep mode in electronic devices. The term “green computing” was introduced to refer to the energy-efficient personal computers.

Interesting Research Findings While deploying data center, the sole concern is high-performance, and this demand has been fulfilled without paying much attention to the energy consumption. An average data center guzzles energy as much as 25,000 households. There is a necessity to move the focus to optimizing for energy efficiency while maintaining high service level performance than optimizing data center resource management for pure performance, as the energy cost is increasing while the availability dwindles. According to certain reports, the total estimated energy bill for data centers in the year 2010 was $11.5 billion and energy costs in a typical data center doubles every five years.

For the development of cloud computing and it to sustain green technologies is exceedingly essential. Of the numerous green methodologies enquired, the DVFS technology is a highly hardware oriented approach and hence it is less flexible.

Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running an enterprise and the web applications. But the critical issue is the drastic surge in the energy consumption of data centers which is triggering by the growing demand for cloud infrastructure. Hence, the energy-efficient solutions are required which results in less number of carbon footprints and thus help in achieving greener computing.

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December 2017

Pioneer Vista

Surfing Ahead of the Trend: HOW TO SPOT AN OPPORTUNITY AND GROW?

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oday we live in a time which is unprecedented in human history. Technology evolves at the drop of a hat and as it does, changes many tangible and intangible elements with it. Five years ago we never thought people would sell their cars and go the “Uber-way”. Today, that is a reality. And amidst this technological advancement and evolution, there lies opportunity. The question I’m often asked is how do we spot an opportunity and grow before it’s ever a trend and the industry becomes saturated? And my most frequent response is: If it were that easy we’d all be millionaires by creating the next big thing. But here’s the saving grace: it’s not that hard either! Here are a few tools I use which have helped me spot opportunity long before it’s become mainstream.

1. Start where you are: You’ve got to start where you are. Don’t wait for all the ducks to line up in a row for you because it’ll never happen. Another reason why this is so important is because so many people think that they need to get into a certain industry in order to innovate new and crazy ideas.

The next big thing could be in your very industry, whether it’s healthcare or construction. There’s a need for innovation and new tech everywhere!

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And if that’s not enough of a reason, here’s another: you know your industry best! If you switch industries it’ll mean you have to start over and learn about an entirely new industry and guess what, anyone who’s been in the industry any longer than you already has an upper-hand. So start where you are!

2. Look out! Keep an eye open for things not working the way they should. Like Seth Godin said: “Broken!” Looking for things that are broken. Broken stuff needs fixing and the reason it ain’t fixed is because when they made the thing, the tech didn’t exist. Today you can create tech that can solve the problem of the “broken” syndrome.

3. Usability and Functionality: It’s appalling to see the number of technologies that have been created that no one uses. I was recently on the judging panel of a start-up event and I was amazed by the kinds of technology that have been built without ever doing a user-base analysis. If you don’t have any users, you don’t make any money.

And if you can’t make money than this isn’t a business, it’s a hobby. It’s so simple but passionate entrepreneurs who believe in their product often forget this. I’m talking to me too!

4. Hire for attitude: So many leaders hire and fire people because a certain person had or didn’t have the right qualifications. Qualifications can be developed, skills can be build, techniques can be learned; but a deeply ingrained characteristic or attitude cannot be easily changed. We hire people for attitude and not just for what they know. This of course doesn’t mean you go about hiring people with great attitude, you won’t get very far with that mentality either. One needs to at the least begin to prioritize attitude more than we are currently.

The greatest entrepreneurs of our time are applying these very skills and turning industries on their heads. It’s time you did it too! And oh! If I were to add one more thing to the list, I’d say: 5. Feedback! Listen to your users.

Listen to what they’re saying because in it lies your very solution. I remember reading an article by Bill Gates once in which he said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.

December 2017

Mohsin Memon

December 2017

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