The 10 Most Scalable Cloud Solution Providers of 2019

www.mirrorreview.com August 2019

Industry Updates Supply Chain 4.0 Is The Next Big Thing In The Market

Marketing Pulse How Animation Is Ruling The Digital Marketing Industry?

Brad Cheedle CEO

Delivering A Consistent Level Of Excellence Through Secure, Hybrid Cloud Solutions

EDITOR’S LETTER

I

www.mirrorreview.com August, 2019

Industry Updates Supply Chain 4.0 Is The Next Big Thing In The Market

Marketing Pulse How Animation Is Ruling The Digital Marketing Industry?

Brad Cheedle CEO

Delivering A Consistent Level Of Excellence

n today's hyper-connected techno world, cloud technology is one of the most dominant and impactful technologies among the others. This distributed data processing technology has made a tremendous impact on businesses by introducing enterprise, ecommerce and web applications, and offering pay-as-you-go services to the consumers. Businesses are shifting from traditional infrastructure and application software to Software as a Service (SaaS), thereby increasingly in the adoption cloud services in the upcoming years. Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will more than double over the 2019-2023 forecast period, according to the latest update to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. With a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.3%, public cloud spending will grow from $229 billion in 2019 to nearly $500 billion in 2023.

Through Secure, Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Higher Adoption of Cloud Technology

This statistic demonstrates the need of cloud solutions providers on large scale in the industry. Therefore, old and new players of industry are increasingly shifting their horizontal capabilities to build advanced cloud solutions today. In our latest issue of “The 10 Most Scalable Cloud Solution Providers of 2019,” we shed light on such dynamic entrepreneurs who are providing the most scalable cloud solutions for companies to stay relevant in the industry. Gracing the cover of this issue, Brad Cheedle, the CEO of Otava, is using his prior experience of diverse domains to deliver best of breed cloud solutions. He believes that hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions will remain the significant elements to manage organizations' business operations.

Moving ahead, the team of Mirror Review has written the inspirational tales of featured cloud solution providers. Along with this, check out Experts' Corner where Jim DuBois (CIO of Microsoft) is offering better ways to migrate to the cloud. Also, Shane Mahon (Founder of Sinterit) shares his views on whether is it time for the entry level SLS 3D printer.

We have also included amazing articles in the Industry Updates and Marketing Pulse sections for our voracious readers and magazine subscribers.

Deepali Sarwade Editorial Coordinator

CREDIT PAGE Publisher : Archana Ghule Editor-in-Chief : Vikram Suryawanshi Editorial Coordinator : Deepali Sarwade Vidya Joshi Rakesh Mahto Shubham Biradar Balkishan Dalai Project Managers : Joseph Thomas David Thomas Pandurang Kulkarni Abhishek Patil Art Director : Vinod Alhat Visualizer : Mark Davis Graphic Designer : Sumit Bonage Aniket Diwane Sakshi Bendre Head of Distribution & Production : Aakash Mahajan Head of Operations : Robert Smith Research Analysts : James Adams Advertising : Maria Smith

Mirror Review Media & Tech C-206, Wisteriaa Fortune, Wakad, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Maharashtra- 411057

+1 (850) 564-8517

info@mirrorreview.com

www.mirrorreview.com Mirror Review Magazine is published by Pericles Ventures Pvt Ltd. No part of Mirror Review magazine may be reproduced, published or used in any manner without prior written consent from the publisher. The team of Mirror Review Magazine has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content. The publisher assumes no responsibility of any part of the content of any advertisement in this publication, including any errors and omissions therein.

FOLLOW US mirrorreviewofďŹ cial MirrorReview1 mirror-review mirrorreview

Cover Story

Articles

Industry Updates Supply Chain 4.0 Is The Next Big Thing In The Market

26

Marketing Pulse How Animation Is Ruling The Digital Marketing Industry?

Delivering A Consistent Level of Excellence Through Secure, Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Experts' Corner

34 Jim DuBois CIO Microsoft

A Better Way To Migrate To The Cloud

18

10

Shane Mahon Founder Sinterit

Is It Time For The Entry Level Sls 3d Printer?

40

Atmosera: Delivering Cloud And Security Solutions To Accelerate The Real Value Of Businesses

20

Corent Technology: A Global Leader In Cloud Migration, Modernization, And SaasiďŹ cation Technologies

24

HashedIn: An Astute Platform That Helps Clients Build Intelligent Saas Solutions

30

Manjrasoft: Enabling Enterprises To Improve Performance And Scalability Through Aneka Technology

32

McObject LLC: Providing Cloud-Based Powerful Database Management Systems For Enterprises

38

Cover Story

Brad Cheedle CEO

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Delivering A Consistent Level Of Excellence Through Secure, Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Cover Story

T

he cloud computing industry has grown tremendously in the last couple of years. The major factors that are fueling this growth are increased automation and agility, the need for delivering superior customer experience, enhanced cost savings and greater return on investment. As a result, cloud solutions providers are increasingly shifting their horizontal capabilities to build advanced cloud solutions today. In this race, Otava, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is one of the leading players that is helping different industry leaders solve sophisticated problems related to their business by delivering hybrid and multi-cloud solutions that are not only smart but also economical and userfriendly.

Offering the Power of Cloud to Businesses Otava is an international provider of secure, compliant hybrid cloud and IT solutions for service providers, channel partners, and enterprise clients. The company’s tagline, ’Expect Exceptional,’ mirrors its mission to deliver a consistent level of excellence for every solution. Moreover, its network of 11data centers and cloud nodes across the US, Europe and Australia safeguard mission-critical apps to guarantee that they are always accessible, safe, and comply with myriad legal and regulatory requirements of government and business.

At Otava, theoperations team is committed to forming strong, long-termpartnerships with that meet their needs now andwell into the future. To achieve this goal, Otavaoffers an array of cloud solutions along with broad portfolio of hybrid cloud, data protection, disaster recovery, security and colocation services. Cloud solutions include managed and self-managed private cloud as well as public cloud, with the ability to layer on software-based or other managed solutions. These scalable solutions are security and compliant centric, meeting the requirements for HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance, SOC 1 & 2 & 3, Privacy Shield compliance, and ISO 27001 compliant hosting.

Recognizing and Fulfilling Clients Business Needs Every organization has its unique needs and requires a specific cloud environment that can handle all its data operations efficiently. Since its inception, Otava has been a huge advocate of avoiding vendor or solution lock-in.

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

It understands that one solution that suits a client may not be compatible with another. Therefore, Otava never offers cookie-cutter, quick-fix solutions. Instead, Otava pays close attention to clients’ issues and offers customized cloud solutions that are tailor-made for each client’s business. This customization, combined with their superior dedicated support team, is a main attraction for clients that choose Otava’s offerings.

A Culture Filled with Transparency and Effective Communication Organizational culture plays a huge role in the success and overall health of a company, its people, and its customers. Accordingly, Otava’s culture was created around the ten basic principles of the Rockefeller Habits

by Verne Harnish, which emphasize effective communication. These principles define how Otava approaches goal-setting and communication with each client to ensure the highest expectations are met. That’s why the Otava team gathers from around the world daily to discuss what is going well and where the company is at risk of falling short on its promise of delivering excellence. Otava also maintains transparency at all levels of the organization, in addition to its other core values of Highest Credibility, Client Focus, Great Ideas Win, and Win-Win or No Deal Partnerships. As a result of embodying these core values across the organization, Otava is poised to deliver results beyond all expectations of clients. “We believe every action should reflect our core values and beliefs – if it doesn’t, we won’t do it,” says Otava CEO Brad Cheedle.

A Veteran Tech Entrepreneur Taking Otava to Great Heights A veteran technology executive and entrepreneur, Brad has firsthand experience of the evolution of technology in the marketplace. Based in Colorado, he also has extensive experience in corporate finance, business development, engineering, technical operations, marketing, product development and mergers and acquisitions. Prior to Otava, the seasoned leader managed teams at Qwest Communications, Onfiber Communications, Level 3 Communications and MCI Communications and assisted in the launch of organizations such as WOW! Business and Zayo Group.

His previous experiences give him the deep industry insights and market knowledge required for driving a successful business like Otava.

Brad believes that a company becomes successful when everyone involved is on the same page and is able to thrive in a healthy working environment. Therefore, each day at Otava begins with a 10-15 minute company-wide meeting to evaluate exceptional customer experience delivery and identify any areas for improvement. The CEO also stays abreast of the latest news and trends to gain insights on the industry to stay relevant with the current market scenarios.

You won't find another partner who will get to know your business like we will, and you won't find another team as dedicated to supporting the toughest requirements and creating win-win deals to get the job done.

’’

Employee Technology Training Investments by Otava Otava continues to expand its global footprint by combining best-of-breed cloud companies and investing in people, tools, and processes. The company is investing in new services and new cloud node locations via a combination of organic growth and additional cloud-related acquisitions.

For its employees, the prominent cloud solution provider offers robust training programs through industry seminars and workshops, on-site lunch-and-learns, manager and leadership sessions, on-demand training, tuition assistance, and industry certification. Hence, the employees develop their skills, passion for progress, attention to detail, and the ability to anticipate and solve challenges, all of which are necessary to build successful careers in cloud engineering.

The Future Scope of Cloud Computing With more than 20 years of experience, Brad has witnessed firsthand the changes occurring in the cloud computing industry. He believes that hybrid cloud and multicloud solutions will remain the significant elements to manage

organizations’ business operations.

He further adds, “In today’s everquickening pace of technology and speed of need, we’re excited to create agile, sophisticated solutions for our customers that meet their digital transformation needs now and in the future.”

Get Inspired, Stay Updated with all the Business World Buzz with Mirror Review Magazine

Don’t Miss an Issue

SUBSCRIBE NOW @www.mirrorreview.com

Company Name

Company Info

Atmosera Jon Thomsen CEO

Atmosera, Inc. is amongst the top cloud solution providers with more than 20 years of experience in managing complex IT environments. www.atmosera.com

BMC Software Ayman Sayed President & CEO

BMC Software's solutions offer speed, agility, and efficiency to tackle business challenges in the areas of service management, automation, operations, and the mainframe. www.bmcsoftware.in

Corent Technology Inc. Feyzi Fatehi CEO

Incepted in 2006, Corent Technology was founded to help close the missing gap in the cloud computing market and that was effective migration, modernization and optimization of existing software to the Cloud, and the ability to rapidly SaaSify legacy or new software on the Cloud. www.corenttech.com

HashedIn Technologies Himanshu Varshney Co-founder & CEO

HashedIn, one of the leading cloud-based service providers is offering innovative cloud-solutions to organizations so that they can gain a competitive edge. www.hashedin.com

LiquidWeb Matthew Hill Founder

Liquid Web is a hosting company totally devoted to web and cloud professionals. www.liquidweb.com

Madison Cloud Randall Van Allen CEO

The Madison Cloud Appliance (MCA) is an innovative private/hybrid cloud solution designed for a variety of specific workloads including DevOps, hybrid cloud migration, edge computing, and field-based IT operations. www.madisoncloud.com

Manjrasoft Dr. Rajkumar Buyya Founder & CEO

Manjrasoft Pty Ltd. offers innovative solutions for the rapid creation of applications and also offers acceleration over scalable and elastic cloud computing environments www.manjrasoft.com

McObject Steven Graves President & CEO

McObject LLC offers proven, ultra-fast data management technology to meet the unique needs of intelligent, connected devices. www.mcobject.com

Otava Brad Cheedle CEO

Otava is one of the leading players that is helping different industry leaders solve sophisticated problems related to their business by delivering hybrid and multi-cloud solutions that are not only smart but also economical and userfriendly. www.otava.com

Thousand Eyes Mohit Lad CEO & Co-Founder

ThousandEyes, Inc. is a network monitoring company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Dublin, London, New York, Tokyo, and Austin, Texas. www.thousandeyes.com

Experts’ Corner

Is It Time For The Entry Level

SLS

PRINTER

A

fter 35 years of skyrocketing development of additive manufacturing, the market is full of different solutions. For the newcomer it is hard to figure out which one technology is a best fit, so the purchase decision is typically based on two factors: popularity and price.

So how most of the fresh 3D printing adepts start? They choose between FDM and SLA. Those are the most recognized technologies, that comes to mind after the phrase “3D printing” resounded in the air. Small, not so expensive and somehow glamorous in they way of printing.

Watching the nozzle building layer after layer in FDM or a laser beam illuminating the resin of SLA can be fascinating.

And what awaits on the other end? Industrial, looking like big metal boxes machines, costing at least hundreds of thousand of dollars. For the 3D printing rookie it is a clear information: this equipment is not for me. But aren’t there any options in between?

Digging deeper Shane Mahon is the Network Solution Architect in a large IT company. It is his day job, but when he returns home, he becomes a Product Designer. Shane races bicycles and sometimes he wants something that no one makes. Once, he thought that maybe he could made some plastic parts or at least prototype those that will be finally made from metal.

He, like a lot of people, started with a FDM 3D printer because those devices are cheap and are everywhere. After a lot of “trial and error” involved, he started to learn what he can do, and what is not possible. He met the first limitations.

- I had a need to do some rapid prototyping and low-volume production of small bicycle parts - Shane says. I have a fairly good FDM printer but I just can’t get the level of detail that I want sometimes, and I’ve had instances where

18

Shane Mahon support structures actually ended up ruining the print. I tried an SLA printer recently because supposedly the resolution is quite good and the one I bought was supposedly very easy to use. In seven tries I had five failures. Even the two "successes" were not really usable to test the fit of my components - he adds.

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

For others it would be an obvious sign, that 3D printing has its limitations, difficult to overcome by a single, homebased user. But Shane was digging deeper to find out if there is another solution. Something which he could reach for and go on with the projects. This is how he found Sintiert and its entry level desktop SLS 3D printer, Lisa.

It wasn’t a blind shot. Shane did a lot of research and read many reviews. He came across various SLS 3D printers.

Some of them were very exotic, like from a Chinese shopping portal. The fact that Sinterit was located in Europe made it relatively easy to get in touch with somebody from the company.

- I had been thinking about the Lisa for some time so I decided to just go ahead and do it - Shane recalls. He bought Sinterit Lisa in January 2019.

SLA 3D printed part (best try) Sinterit Lisa desktop SLS 3D printed part (first try) – A lot of positive reviews, very good specification and being as local as you can get in this market were some of decision factors - Shane recalls. I can tell you that the hardest part of using the printer was getting it up the stairs.

After that I simply unpacked it, read the instructions, prepared the printer, and let it run. The small part took a few hours to print, so I went downstairs, had dinner, watched a movie, and returned later to a cooling printer. I didn’t worry about the print going bad halfway through and coming back to a blob of melted nylon being dragged around the inside of the printer by a hot nozzle. After it finished, I simply opened it up and found my model exactly how I had imagined - he adds.

It came out perfect on the first try with the Lisa (visible on the part on the left). There are also working hinges as an added bonus.

-So what does Lisa do for me? It saves me a lot of time first of all. It saves me from messy cleanups. Working with the powder is quite easy, and since both the software and the printer help me measure it, I don't waste any. That saves me money. Most of all though, it saves me headaches and lets me get on with testing and building things. Which is why I bought a 3D printer in the first place - sums up Shane.

For Shane Mahon, Lisa was an answer to the need he had at the moment. At first he started printing just for himself.

Later he started to prototype for friends. One of them said he wanted a mount for his cycling computer that had a bracket for the electronic shifting control box underneath.

Shane tried all different kinds of settings, nozzles, support materials, everything he could think of with his FDM printer and he was never successful in getting that little bracket right.

19

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Delivering Cloud And Security Solutions To Accelerate The Real Value Of Businesses

T

he shifts to the cloud and outsourced IT functions have massively increased over the past several years. Executives now expect even higher productivity at a lower cost from their IT investments. They are determined to find ways that will enable the organization to get out of the Data Center business and instead, focus on their core competencies and strategic goals. To achieve this target, a managed service provider (MSP) offers a complete service solution including all infrastructure, software, management, and support. With the rapid growth of the industry, the demand for MSPs has increased. There is a strong competition amongst businesses providing IT solutions to attract potential clients and stay ahead in the race.

Based in Beaverton, OR, Atmosera, Inc. is amongst the top cloud solution providers with more than 20 years of experience in managing complex IT environments. By leveraging the engineering expertise, reference architectures, and the team’s consultative skills, the company identifies where the client may be on the cloud curve, and what solution best suits their needs in order to accelerate the value of the business.

Establishment of Atmosera Atmosera has been in the business since 1995 and contributed significantly to the evolution of technology.

The company initially started as an internet service provider in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, there was an addition of colocation. In 2014, the firm pivoted to manage private, hybrid, and public cloud with Microsoft Azure services. The growth and evolution of the company is the outcome of being curious, having the ambition to serve its customers as well as being adaptive—the evolution has been constant and customer needs have been pivoted or changed. Through this

20

decades-long journey, Atmosera has maintained an incredible focus on engineering expertise and 24x7x365 customer support/management.

Supporting Clients with Scalable Services Being a hybrid managed services provider, the company designs, deploys, and manages optimal cloud environments based on the application use case and business goals. Atmosera is a Gold-level, nationally managed Microsoft Partner and Microsoft Azure Expert MSP (one amongst 50 in the world) so it can architect and manage public, private and hybrid clouds based on the Microsoft Azure Platform of technologies. The firm’s client history includes 225 clients in 40 states and 10 countries. It has come across a variety of different, complex use cases and manages a variety of cloud environment to meet an equal number of desired outcomes. The scalable cloud solution provider also offers information security, compliance (HIPAA/HITECH, PCI-DSS, IRS-1075, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II), data protection, colocation, and DevOps services.

The scalability of these services comes from three key factors—leveraging software, automation, and defined runbook processes.

Training Employees to Deliver the Best Performance In an ever-changing technology landscape, training and education are significant and they are an important element of Atmosera’s corporate culture. The company has persistently received excellent customer feedback.

To deliver their best performance, the employees go through a specialized training program called Atmosera University. This training comprises of programs and employee incentives around certifications, job-specific

‘

Jon Thomsen CEO training, and general education. For example, around 60% of its technical staff is Microsoft-certified Azure Administrators. To accomplish this, the employees need to pass the prelimary exams. Along with the customized training program, the company also relies on its industry partners who also provide their specific brand of technical training.

A Passionate CEO’s Journey Towards Success Jon Thomsen, the CEO of Atmosera has had experience in almost every business. Through his journey, he has held senior executive positions at successful startups and Fortune 500 companies. He has led businesses in the telecom, food, energy, and now cloud computing spaces. According to Jon, passion is the key source of his journey; once the passion is gone or the opportunity to create greatness wanes, he bids his farewell to the business. Currently, he has been working at Atmosera for about 6 years now and his passion is still strong. Jon’s expertise is to take client companies to the next level of growth through a high degree of focus on them and deliver operational excellence. Coming from an impressive academic background, Jon is backed with a Master’s in Business Administration from the J.L. Kellog Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Willamette University.

As the CEO of a leading cloud computing company, Jon has to perform several key responsibilities daily. In order

Whether your company wants to be in Azure, a private cloud or colocation, Atmosera will expertly translate your business needs into the optimal solution. to make sure everything is running smoothly, his daily tasks are aligned systematically. Jon has also built a few everyday responsibilities that cannot be neglected.

Therefore, the very first thing he does after waking up is to check the email alerts, to ensure that the work is moving swiftly and if there is a necessity of coursecorrecting in the plan laid out before. Another responsibility is to serve the customers across time zones as the clients expect 24x7 services. After checking the customary dashboard elements, Jon jets off to work to be a part of and support the team.

Aiming Towards a World that is “Auto-Everything” Jon believes that beyond the accelerated growth of public cloud adoption, cloud computing will continue to evolve from a software-driven perspective. The software will initiate Feature, Functionality, Transparency, and ease of use. Environments, services, or optimizations that would have taken days or weeks in the past are now done in mere hours or minutes. With this pace of acceleration in the software paradigm, the use and benefits of cloud computing will dramatically increase.

While looking at the growth of the company, it has progressively elevated in scope, scale, and complexity—without adding any significant amount of people. The growth has been achieved due to constant efforts to embrace the software-defined paradigm of how securely it delivers mission-critical infrastructure. Jon envisions that the forthcoming years will comprise an “auto-everything” service.

21

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Corent Technology A Global Leader In Cloud Migration, Modernization, And Saasication Technologies

I

n today’s digital world, cloud technology is one of the most dominant and impactful technologies among the others. It offers new opportunities to organizations to compete and scale their businesses on a global level. Right from reduced costs, enhanced flexibility, secured data, effective collaboration to greater integration, cloud-based business solutions are proving to be the game-changers of the IT world.

Incepted in 2006, Corent Technology was founded to help close the missing gap in the cloud computing market and that was effective migration, modernization and optimization of existing software to the Cloud, and the ability to rapidly SaaSify legacy or new software on the Cloud. Today it is one of the most scalable cloud solution providers that offers customers with a complete solution covering all major OS platforms, technology stacks, supporting most major clouds.

SurPaaS Platform: A Complete End to End Platform Over the years, Corent has developed SurPaaS, a disruptive innovation that has the potential to revolutionize the software industry through democratizing SaaS. From the bouquet of its offerings, it provides SurPaaS, a complete end-to-end platform for an IT organization’s cloud journey.

It offers a class-leading discovery, analysis, and automated migration of application workloads to the cloud. And the migration is just the beginning. SurPaaS Smart Shift will then get to work to re-topologize and optimize applications for the Cloud, upgrade or change OS platforms and even migrate to cloud PaaS services or containerize the desired application components.

The next step after migration of applications and data is operational monitoring and continuous optimization of the workloads to ensure that customers are actually getting the benefits of the cloud in terms of cost efficiency, performance and scalability. Corent’s SurPaaS platform can

24

also automatically SaaSify the applications for those who want to go ahead and offer newly migrated and optimized application “as a service.”

A Maverick Team of Industry Veterans Dedicated to Disruptive Innovation Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology, was trained as a computer scientist and software architect. He started his corporate journey by working with HP in Silicon Valley. In his initial days, Feyzi worked as a member of a small team that successfully invented the first real time database, something very similar to what is known today as SAP HANA. After finishing business school while working full time, Feyzi started managing regional and later global businesses at HP. Then he undertook a few entrepreneurial leadership roles at different Cloud and SaaS focused startups that eventually led him to Corent Technology.

Feyzi who is immensely proud of Corent’s ‘exponential’ team, including its power advisory board, believes everyone in the company should be considered a leader and has to lead in their area of focus to take the company closer to its strategic goals and objectives on a day-to-day basis.

Commenting on this leadership mandate, Feyzi says, “A leader is the one who is genuinely grounded and clear about his / her vision and values and have the strength and skills to act accordingly.”

Working in Partnership to Address the Market Potential and Scalability Since the beginning, Corent Technology has believed in working with its partners to provide support or in a turnkey migration factory model. For this, Corent works closely with its SI (Systems Integrator) and MSP (Managed Systems Provider) partners who are using Corent’s SurPaaS platform to serve the needs of their customers, greatly augmenting the capacity, as well as the geographic and

‘ At Corent Technology, we have managed to practically automate the entire cloud migration journey.

Corent Technology Team

industry reach for its platform. to match its business reach scalability through effective partnerships, Corent architected its SurPaaS platform so that it is able to take advantage of the inherent scalability of the cloud to address different size customers and migration projects, which might include from hundreds all the way to many thousands of servers.

Recognizing the Need for Innovation Corent’s SurPaaS was developed by recognizing the missing gap in the cloud computing market. Due to its unique functionalities and benefits, Corent Technology’s SurPaaS was named amongthe “ Top 10 Cloud Solution Providers” As well as among “The Most Disruptive Private Companies” in 2018.

For Corent’s unique ability to rapidly deliver any software application as scalable and cost- effective SaaS, and for their invention of “Software Defined SaaS®” platform, it was recognized as the “PaaS for SaaS” platform by the Gartner Group Training and R&D Understanding the Current Market Requirements To work with the leading-edge companies and provide dynamic solutions, Corent believes in developing the grass root level of the company. It facilities in-house cross training and closely works with the cloud partners to develop the cutting-edge solutions that can be incorporated into the platform. After years of investing in R&D and

understanding the technology, a lot of training is given to the team at Corent Technology.

Furthermore, Corent believes in taking full advantage of the training programs and opportunities provided by the partners like Microsoft and AWS and allowing the company employee to get trained and certified. This, among many other required credentials, wouldallow the company to achieve partnership status recognitions such as AWS Advanced Technology Partner and Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Partner.

Top Prerequisite Skills for Building a Successful Career in Cloud Computing Predicting the future with relative certainty comes with years of experience and knowledge about the industry.

Similarly, knowing which skills are needed to build a successful career in this ever-advancing industry comes through leadership. According to Feyzi, good communications skills are essential for any career; be it cloud or any other industry. Cloud computing is evolving so rapidly that the ability to learn and absorb new information and techniques is a key skill. And so is the ability to conceptualize the essential characteristics of the cloud, its virtuality and scalability, so that they can be leveraged effectively.

25

Industry Updates

y C l p h p a u i n S Thing e N e h T

g i B xt

In T he M

a et rk

Is

4.0

Robots IOT

Augmented reality

Simulation Big Data Industry 4.0 Cybersecurity 3D cloud computing 26

Industry 4.0

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

History of supply chain with its transformation Supply chain 4.0 includes the use of modern instruments such as robotics, internet of things, and advanced analytics of big data that will help all the retailers and businessmen to improve their performance and with that, they can also focus on increasing their customer's satisfaction. For any business to run for a long period, constant improvement in their methods as well as accepting the change becomes important.

market right from increasing pollution to steady development in the urban areas all over the world.

The online market trend is getting huge day by day.

Owing to this growth, the customers are getting more options to choose from with other customised services.

The pressure to stay alive is also increasing with such competition around where businesses are providing services such as one-day delivery, on-time delivery.

Digitization of Supply Chain

Over the last three decades, the supply chain has completely transformed from just being a part of the process to completely becoming a whole new entity of its own. Later, supply chain management included advanced planning of demand and supply for specially designed sales and operation teams to manage sales. And after that it also started to outsource logistics to reduce the load from the business that helped the businesses to focus on its core activities.

Supply chain 2.0, was mainly based on paper, and used low level of digitisation. Most of the processes were done manually. However, it had some of limitations such as restricted data availability. Supply chain 3.0 had the basic digital component placed but wasn't fully developed. But, Supply chain 4.0 is the most matured of all three levels and predicted to become the next big thing in the market.

Understating Industrial revolution 4.0 with current trends Industry 4.0 is a new phase of the industrial revolution in the world that aims at automation, interconnectivity, machine learning, and real-time data. This revolution has brought a huge change and chaos in the market that makes all the businesses to push themselves to try out new ways to manage their supply chain and also rethink their earlier ways of supply chain management. Within this period there were several changes affected the

Upgradation of the supply chain can be one of the methods used for tackling these changes and trends.

Digitization of the supply chain will make the supply chain faster, flexible, accurate, efficient and individualistic.

Using advanced forecasting approaches such as predictive analytics of internal and external trends will reduce down the delivery time of the high runners to just a few hours. For more precise decision of demand and supply, the forecast can be carried out on weekly or daily basis depending upon the product instead of monthly.

Real time planning helps to react according to the current demand and supply situations in the market. The idea of mass customisation and micro segmentation will be implemented as demand from customers for individualised products is continuously increasing. With the advancement of the technology and use of the same in the supply chain will provide more accurate data related to the products and services. Efficiency plays a key role in every industry but in case of the supply chain management, the use of robots delivers outcomes more efficiently as compared to humans. To make most of supply chain 4.0, companies need to create more flexible and transparent planning which will not only help them to cash on the ever-changing situation of the market, but also enable them to predict their business for the future.

27

Industry Updates

The truth behind Data wastage Irregular updating of data in the system, that has remained unchanged for years, can affect the balance sheet of the company. If incorrect data is communicated with others, it can cause a lot of data wastage, thereby hindering the performance efficiency. The process of supply chain is interlinked with each other and delaying in one process can hamper the other processes as well. Therefore, updating correct data is extremely important. For this, the organisational setup, processes, governance, and incentives need to be arranged within and between partners in the supply chain to get the advanced level of integrated process.

How supply chain 4.0 will bring the change?

The upcoming supply chain will mostly depend upon big data, advanced analytics, and automation knowledge of work.

Predictive analytics in demand planning and closed-loop planning are the two examples of levers that can make a significant impact. Supply chain 4.0 will change the traditional methods of logistics with better connectivity, additive manufacturing, advanced analytics, and advanced automation. The performance management process moves from a regular process to often monthly process to an operational process, aiming directly at continuous improvement and exception handling. Touch order processing and real-time re-planning are the two examples of how order management is improved in lowering the cost through higher reliability due to granular feedback, automation of efforts, and superior customer experience through reliable and immediate responses. The collaboration of information can be done using clouds between customers, suppliers, and the company and with the logistics department. It can also be used between the partners or businesses helping them to learn from each other.

The need and requirement of the businesses are different from each other mostly depending upon various factors such as location, government policies, economy, current situation, climate, and many more. Hence, the customization of the supply chain is a must to meet the demand of the customers and business.

The unavailability of the product in the current stock may lead to losing the customer. This may lead to customer shifting to other brands. Introducing advanced methods can bring overall transform the supply chain process.

Minimizing the transportation system, proper channeling of resources, maintaining proper stock count, and regularly updating the data are few of the methods that can be used to reduce the supply chain cost. Planning is the foremost step of any system where the major decisions are taken to properly systemize the process. If implemented,it will result in cutting down most of the unnecessary costs.

Digital supply chain The transformation of the supply chain can be done using two factors such as capabilities and environment. Digitization will increase the capabilities of the organization and target the same while recruiting for a similar profile. The second step is to create a basic environment for the organization to establish the digitization, an independent environment where testing, development, and implementation of the solution can be implemented. All in all, it will make the supply chain faster, reliable, more flexible, and efficient.

28

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

HashedIn Technologies An Astute Platform That Helps Clients Build Intelligent SaaS Solutions

I

n the tech-driven era, Cloud computing services have substituted the hard-drive technology. Today, they are also utilized in our daily routines such as email services, watching movies through the internet, editing documents, and storing pictures. In addition, the use of cloud technology has paved a way for us to design and create new applications, store and recover data, and host a website. Therefore, an astounded look into the future of cloud computing showcases that cloud computing is seen as a combination of cloud-based software products and onpremises compute that will help to create a wide range of hybrid IT deployments. Such promises are enabling organizations to make a broader shift towards the automation of monitoring, resource allocation, and troubleshooting within the cloud. Upscaling this automation process into versatile artificial intelligence is the next step, one that will likely take hold this year.

Another major development would be the growth of Edge Computing. With the increased number of devices connecting to the cloud, the on-going trials of the technology, and the growth of 5G, edge deployments could trace out to be an upcoming trend. In order to survive in the competitive world, organizations need to adapt to the advancements of the cloud culture. HashedIn, one of the leading cloud-based service providers is offering innovative cloud-solutions to organizations so that they can gain a competitive edge.

Growth Journey of the Leading Cloud-Service Provider Founded in 2010, HashedIn is a product development services company focused on building, accelerating, and managing SaaS products and design-led product engineering. Leveraging its SaaS development expertise, the company has been transforming enterprises using its cutting edge technologies. The iSaaS vision of HashedIn has been built on 4 major pillars namely, Integrations, Analytics, AI/ML, and Modern UI/UX.

30

Moreover, the company’s team has grown from four founders to more than 470 hashers in the last one decade, without any outside funding or investment. In these years, it has continuously made efforts to maintain the practice of three things All Hands Meeting, Open House and a yearly Company Outing that was implemented from the day of inception.

Customer Centricity is the Mantra HashedIn platform portrays the value of product design thinking, agile delivery, modern software engineering, and DevOps best practices. Additionally, it comprises of vast experiences in crafting digital products for customers in the form of an agile squad as a service; to help conceptualize, launch, and scale great software products.

Over the decade, the company has successfully built 150+ products for customers globally. Now, it has also become an extended technological arm for many organizations owing to its solution-oriented approach and expertise in understanding the core business nuances, along with creating impactful solutions for the customers.

With such a focused approach, unique practices, and technology expertise, HashedIn follows a customer centric mantra by celebrating customer success and constantly endeavours to provide customer delight. The company has also developed reusable modules, proprietary tools, and processes that quickly help realize the client’s ideas by giving them a competitive advantage.

One of the main challenges for many enterprises today is to modernize existing software assets. HashedIn’s modernization offering is focused on ‘re-inventing’ existing software assets to make them more aligned with the business needs. This is done by focusing on SaaSifying and Cloudifying the product, enhancing agility through DevOps automation, transforming UI/UX, and the complete rewrite of the application code by leveraging its RAPiD framework when required.

‘ With our reusable components & framework, we help enterprises quicken their product development process & yield competitive advantage & save costs.

Himanshu Varshney Co-founder & CEO

HashedIn thrives in a culture of innovation and partnerships to scale to greater heights. The most scalable cloud service providing company believes in growing everything that ought to grow; be it customer success, its accounts, or the hashers. In expanding its enterprise, it has partnered with firms like Amazon AWS, Redis Labs, Salesforce, and a few more to build and scale highperformance SaaS products.

An Instinctive Individual Aspiring to be an Entrepreneur Himanshu Varshney, the Co-founder and CEO of HashedIn Technologies, is an individual who has always aspired to become an entrepreneur. During his journey of more than a decade, he learned that one could only achieve success if he is open to change, encourage ideas, and empower the people to act like owners. His vision was to build things that could potentially make life better with advancements in technology, and this led to the foundation of HashedIn Technologies.

Before co-founding the venture, he had an experience of more than a decade in the software industry. He started his career at Triology Software, and with time moved up to the role of the Director of Global Services. He also had the privilege to head delivery for Versata (aka Triology Inc), where he worked with 50+ vendors from 10+ countries, delivering technology solutions for Fortune 500 enterprises.

Choosing the Right Hashers for Driving Continued Growth Himanshu believes that one of HashedIn’s biggest strength has been its employees. Irrespective of the size of the organization, it’s the employees who are the ones who deliver profits for the firm. So, HashedIn believes in attracting and hiring the right talent for the company and doesn’t mind going the extra mile to give them an atmosphere where they can thrive. Therefore, while selecting any employee, Himanshu and his team considers the top three qualities i.e. learning, passion, and ownership.

At HashedIn, the work culture is innovation-driven which includes an intensive training program. In this program, the candidates undergo the training session at the HashedIn University. Apart from the specified training, the firm also provides opportunities to take up AWS training and certification courses. The team is also equipped with sophisticated tools and resources to power their advanced developmental capabilities. This venture is indeed an epitome of how a leading cloud-tech company creates exhilarating experiences for its customers with jovial teams and happy employees.

Over the period, HashedIn’s growth trajectory has been slow and steady, which was a conscious effort of the team to have a solid establishment. At present, HashedIn’s team is striving to expand and grow at an exponential rate across the globe and hopes to become the go-to company for building and managing iSaaS Products and Platforms.

31

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Manjrasoft Enabling Enterprises To Improve Performance And Scalability Through Aneka Technology

O

ver the years, the cloud computing landscape has evolved tremendously and is estimated to continue its upward momentum in the future as well. This distributed data processing technology has made a huge impact on businesses by hosting enterprise, e-commerce and web applications, and offering pay-as-you-go services to the consumers. However, innovative solutions for elastic cloud computing environment are lacking in this industry.

Recognizing the market gap and taking it a step further, Manjrasoft Pty Ltd., provides innovative solutions for the rapid creation of applications and also offers acceleration over scalable and elastic cloud computing environments.

Incepted in 2008, as a spinoff company of the University of Melbourne, it commercializes innovations in cloud and big data computing platforms.

Delivering Application Acceleration Services and Solutions over Cloud Manjrasoft’s innovative offerings can be divided into three types such as Products––Aneka Cloud Application Platform software, Solutions––customised tools, content, and demonstrators targeting education and training, rendering/engineering, big data analytics, deep learning, finance and life sciences domains and Services––Consultancy. Aneka technology is backed by a US patent and is a flagship technological product of Manjrasoft, Melbourne-based Australian innovative company. The unique feature about its Aneka technology is that it is the world’s first cloud application platform supporting multiple programming models and allowing seamless integration of multiple distributed computing resources including public and private clouds. It also supports elastic scaling of applications on multiple clouds depending on customers’ quality of service requirements which is a part of SLA in the market-based cloud computing environments.

32

The development of user-friendly technology allows software applications that require high computation capabilities to run across a number of networked computers and servers. The unique technology delivers efficiency in the most cost-effective way and also increases performance.

It removes the barriers for broad cloud computing adoption by offering system integrators, independent software vendors, IT enterprises, and other entities advantage of secure delivery of application by allowing them the use of both public and private clouds.

A Global Thought Leader behind Manjrasoft’s Prominence in Cloud Computing Dr. Rajkumar Buyya, Founder & CEO of Manjrasoft has over 25 years of industrial and academic R&D experience in software systems for Internet, CAD, and high-performance distributed computing applications. Due to his immense industry knowledge and technological prowess, he has been appreciated with numerous awards for his excellent work and research over the years. In 1992, he received Dharma Ratnakara Memorial Trust Gold Medal for excellence in academic achievement. Later in 2005, 2008, he received “Research Excellence Awards” from the University of Melbourne. Other recognitions include “2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing” and “Scopus Researcher of the Year 2017” with Excellence in Innovative Research Award.

He is a published author of over 650 R&D articles in high impact and peer reviewed conferences & journals and has also penned seven textbooks.

In his academic role, Dr. Buyya serves as a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His inquisitive personality allows him to question various things. As a sign of a life-long learner, he makes sure that

‘ Dr. Rajkumar Buyya Founder & CEO

At Manjrasoft, we provide solutions for solving problems faster on clouds.

he keeps himself updated with all the latest tech trends and challenges that provide opportunities to make further advancements. He also always finds creativity fuelled ways to keep the customers interested in the technology.

Moreover, Dr. Buyya’s out-of-the-box approach allows him to reflect upon the level of innovation required to further make an impact using Manjrasoft’s services and technology in the tech space.

computing companies. The team led by Dr. Buyya possess a clear understanding of the fundamentals of parallel and distributed computing, years of hands-on experience with latest technologies, and the ability to create a proof of concept applications in different emerging areas, thereby giving a good impression on their customers. As a result, a strong bond is developed between the company and customers allowing a healthy collaboration along with an added advantage over the other competitors.

Extensive List of Cherished Clienteles Manjrasoft provides solutions that not only allows it to work faster but also aids its team to build and manage cutting-edge cloud applications. Ultimately, creation of such user-friendly solutions solidifies a bond between the company and its customers. To date, the most scalable cloud solution provider has worked with many channel partners-based in India and China and rendered its solutions and services to customers widely and rapidly. The result of which can be noticed in the list of its cherished customers such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, Anna University, University of Hyderabad (India), China Southern Railways, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Tribhuvan University (Nepal), University of Malaya (Malaysia), and ADRIN/Indian Space Research Organisation.

Strengthening Customer-Company Bond Manjrasoft’s experience of working with some of the leading tech giants around the world such as IBM, GoGrid, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Citrix, Redhat, Autodesk, VM Ware, and Intel makes them stay ahead of the other cloud

Furthermore, Manjrasoft also believes in investing in new applications and technological trends and how it can position them in the right direction. As a mark of the best company, it enlightens its partners about the latest technology know-how and how these opportunities will play in the long run.

Enabling New Innovations through Manjrasoft’s Centre of Excellence in Campus The established Centre of Excellence in Cloud Computing with the use of Manjrasoft’s Aneka technologies and teaching/learning resources allows University and technical institutional customers to train and empower their students, researchers, and developers with advanced computing skills. A learning program developed that supports Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) applications at the campus offers many benefits to the students. The advanced education and training program for UG and PG students allows them to perform research, securing and improving accreditations, securing grants, participation in competitions, and peer recognitions in innovation.

33

Experts’ Corner

A Better Way To Migrate To The

E

Cloud

very company I talk to has some plan for digital transformation. Most of them understand the implications of the rapidly accelerating pace of change, and the need to transform to thrive at this new pace.

Yet there is no common definition for what this means, and certainly no agreed template that is simple to follow. A component that is often a part of the plan is some sort of cloud migration. While we know that “the cloud” isn’t an outcome itself, it is one of the best enablers of agility for companies wanting to transform. It wasn’t too many years ago that many companies were trying to decide if they were going to put a piece of their infrastructure into a public cloud. Today, the question has changed from if to when, but still there are few companies that are taking full advantage of the opportunity. Even after all the evidence, I still hear claims that the cloud is more expensive or less secure than what most companies can do themselves. Statements like these come from companies that haven’t figured out how to seize the opportunities yet.

I am not going to claim that my old team has it all figured out either, but while pushing the boundaries we learned enough to realize way more value than what we had originally dreamed possible. We started the same way that many companies did, trying to plan out and justify the whole migration before we started. When we did get started, we learned so much that we had to throw out the original plan. Now I tell companies that are just starting to pick something simple that will be on the high side of savings, and move it to learn. Capture the learnings and use the savings to fund the next move. If you do it right the whole migration funds itself.

Some context is useful before I explain a few of the lessons we learned. I ran the IT team at Microsoft, and while my bias for Azure is obvious, these lessons apply to any cloud migration, regardless of provider. It is also important to

34

note that Satya, Microsoft’s CEO, viewed my team as a customer of Azure to drive feedback to make the product better. This meant that we needed to consume the Azure services the same way that customers would and pay for them at market rates. This made me a better customer as I had to justify the costs in my budget and realize the value just like real customers. We moved an environment that was already very optimized in an on-premise private cloud, and consisted of three thousand applications running on 60k virtual machines, using many petabytes of data. One of the big indicators of how much we learned as we went was the fact that our total Azure bill from Microsoft when we were half done, was the same as the bill was when we were all done. Hopefully the optimization we learned along the way can help you accelerate your own benefits.

Here is what we learned When looking at the whole opportunity, it is important to understand that the bigger win is around the agility for your teams, enabling faster delivery of your mission critical needs at the new pace of innovation. The total cost opportunity is a reduction of the expenses occurred to operate the physical data centers (depreciation of the space, power and cooling systems), elimination of the data center network, server and storage costs, plus part of the people cost dedicated to provisioning and managing all of this (savings from reallocation of employees and cutting of outsource contracts). This savings not only paid for more than our entire Azure bill. I also funded the cost of the migration, and allowed us to return tens of millions of dollars back to the company bottom line. More importantly, the agility increase allowed us to begin delivering at a higher level at a time when the speed to value was required to fuel the overall company transformation.

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Step one: First, eliminate what isn’t needed. Experiment with quick wins. Move application packages to SaaS.

economical than IaaS because you don’t need to manage or pay for the infrastructure.

It is helpful to have a good inventory of what exists in your data centers. Don’t waste time planning out the whole migration, but do pick some easy capabilities to move first to learn. Easy means lower regulatory or security risk with less integration to other apps. It helps save more if the app runs on old hardware that is near end of life or if the hardware can be repurposed to avoid some other spend.

Step Two: Eliminate persistent non-production environments

While you are doing the initial experiments to learn how to migrate to the cloud, there are two more things you can do.

Leveraging data from the portfolio, in particular data about hardware utilization, eliminate apps and capabilities that are rarely used. This will be hard because someone will insist they are important, but usually it is the team that supports them as part of their job that fights the hardest. Historical data shows that 20-30% of most data center capacity can be turned off rather than migrated. This estimate is larger when you include non-production environments and what I’ll discuss in the next paragraph. The second task in parallel to migration experiments is to move all packaged applications to the SaaS version of that application. If the vendor you are using doesn’t provide a SaaS version or the app is home-grown, I recommend that you find an equivalent application that is SaaS or use a third party tool such as Corent SurPaaS/SaaS to quickly SaaS-enable the app. The principle here is that SaaS is way more

It took us a while to figure this out, but there is no need to use cloud capacity for things that are not running all the time. In particular, when we first moved all of our development and test environments to Azure, we realized that we could “snooze” capacity when it wasn’t in use.

Then we learned that we could build provisioning into our test automation, so the first step of the test automation provisions the test environment, then it loads data as necessary, runs the tests, and then turns everything off saving all telemetry from the tests to for further evaluation.

For most companies, somewhere around half of their capacity is used by development, test, integration test and user acceptance test environments. With these off except when necessary, the savings are significant. It also turns out the resulting test automation improves quality by facilitating CI/CD automation as well as significantly improving development agility.

Step Three: Right size your production capacity Using the same principle that you don’t need cloud capacity provisioned for capabilities not in use, the cloud allowed us to scale for normal and use automation to increase scale

35

Experts’ Corner

when needed rather than provisioning for peaks like we learned to do historically. We also leveraged cloud capabilities to spin up BC/DR environments when needed, rather than keeping them idle all the time. Depending on the level of volatility, this rightsizing can eliminate another half of the capacity that you need to consume. Also, avoid lifting and shifting workloads to IaaS whenever possible. It is way less efficient so ideally you would refactor applications into PaaS and FaaS services unless you need to move something because it integrates closely with something else you are moving.

Step Four: Using automated tools When my team first did our cloud migration, we had to do everything manually, or develop our own tools. Now there are many good tools available. As an example, for very basic scanning/discovery and Lift and Shift, Microsoft offers Azure Migrate as a free tool. On the Azure Migrate page, they also list other tools for scanning and discovery (Cloudamize, Corent Tech SurPaaS, Turbonomic, Unicloud and Device 42). For actual migration they also list Corent Tech SurPaaS, and Carbonite as ISV tools that could be used. Other cloud providers may also provide tools, and some of the ISV tools listed here can be used for migration to other clouds.

Making this all work Unfortunately, just following the steps above isn’t enough.

In fact the hardest part from my experience was related to people. Change is hard. The infrastructure team will shrink materially. Fortunately, the team that is left will become even more important in governing the templates and spend, and the application teams are going to need the other people with infrastructure skills to design all the cloud provisioning into the test automation. Be transparent with your team about the changes. Offer roles in the application and security teams to infrastructure people willing to move.

Outsource their positions so you can ramp down that contract without needing to eliminate employees as the migration progresses. Change the accountability for the cloud spend to the application teams that have the ability to control it. Also hold the application teams accountable for their security, so the new security team becomes a wanted advisor rather than friction in the migration. Measure progress by reduction of your on-premise footprint, optimizing to eliminate whole data centers.

The migration isn’t done when everything is in the cloud Continue to optimize once you move. You will learn more tricks to drive efficiencies. You should continue to refactor to eliminate anything that was just lifted to IaaS. Better yet, find more things you can move to SaaS. Long before you are done migrating, you will start realizing some agility benefits which should be contagious for your teams to drive the rest faster. If you aren’t seeing all these benefits yet, don’t wait to plan it all out. Try. Learn. Accelerate your transformation.

About the Author As the most recent CIO of Microsoft, Jim DuBois is a Fortune 500 board director and global technology advisor. He has more than 30 years of experience in a broad range of IT and software development leadership roles including with Accenture and has worked with enterprise leaders from around the globe.

Jim DuBois, CIO | Microsoft 36

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

McObject LLC: Providing Cloud-Based Powerful Database Management Systems For Enterprises

I

n today’s hyper-connected techno world, data is at the heart of every modern business, and any strategy for managing it must include a plan for storage and disaster recovery, security, action, and automation. But, technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) poses great unprecedented challenges for database administrators in terms of scalability, flexibility, and connectivity. Thus, the industry will need new databases to handle increasing amounts of data generated from IoT devices. To fulfill this need, Steven Graves, the President and CEO of McObject LLC, with his expert team, is offering proven, ultra-fast data management technology to meet the unique needs of intelligent, connected devices.

The Reason behind the Foundation of McObject Steven came up with the idea to establish McObject when he and Andrei Gorine (CTO of McObject) were having a conversation about a need for a new real-time embedded database. This database was to be used in what was then considered primarily hardware devices: telecom and networking equipment, industrial controllers, avionics, etc.

This conversation led to the creation of McObject in 2001 and the launch of the eXtremeDB In-Memory Database System (IMDS) product family, the first in-memory embedded DBMS created specifically for embedded systems.

Delivering Smarter, Reliable and Cost-Effective Applications Federal Way, WA-based McObject creates the eXtremeDB database system for intelligent devices, embedded systems, and scalable real-time applications. Its proven eXtremeDB software is built on a core IMDS architecture, thereby, making applications smarter and more reliable & costeffective to develop and maintain. Presently, eXtremeDB in the cloud is primarily used for Big Data and financial systems. Since the inception, this database system has

38

evolved to incorporate persistent storage and more programming interfaces such as SQL/JDBC/ODBC. Now, it also integrates more languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python and Lua, time-series data, sharding, and the client/server model. McObject offers eXtremeDB for HPC (High Performance Computing) for cloud computing. This database system comes with the following features: Ÿ Statistical analysis: eXtremeDB for HPC has a library of more than 100 functions for performing statistical analysis of time series data like grand, group, grid, window averages, etc. Ÿ Pipelining: The comprehensive math library of eXtremeDB is the building blocks that can be amassed into a pipeline to minimize information flows and maximize usage of CPU and L1/L2/L3 cache as much as possible. Ÿ Columnar and conventional row-oriented storage: The database system provides best of OLTP and time-series data management. Ÿ Horizontal partitioning (sharding): Elastically scale databases on-prem or in the cloud. Utilize every CPU and every core. Ÿ High Availability: For using Master/slave model, the accessibility of "five 9s" is required. The replicas are in read-only mode and can be used to balance the load of queries. Highly configurable synchronous, asynchronous, and partial replication. Ÿ Cluster: Master/master model also supports “five 9s” availability, and enables distributed processing of database operations. Ÿ Multiple APIs: eXtremeDB covers different languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python or Lua, and SQL (including JDBC and ODBC drivers) or a native language API. Importance of Scalability in Database Sphere As market demands are never static, scalability has become a crucial catalyst that helps in improving the availability

‘

Steve Graves President & CEO and performance in the database. If the data is not available, applications cannot run and as a result, the company may lose their business. Therefore, McObject’s eXtremeDB offers elastic scalability through sharding. Because of this feature, databases are partitioned (“sharded”), with each partition/shard managed by an instance of the DBMS server. These shards can be dispersed on a storage array (which may be a SAN). Thereby, keeping a CPU core busy with each server or distributed across different physical servers with their own storage systems.

In addition to delivering high availability via failover, each shard can have one or more replica or backup copies to share the query-processing load. Distributed query processing across multiple servers, CPUs and/or CPU cores accelerate performance. In some cases, through parallel execution of database operations and by harnessing the combined processing power, memory and I/O bandwidth of many nodes rather than just one also accelerate performance. This processing played a key role in eXtremeDB’s record-setting STAC-M3 benchmark implementations.

Offering Flexible and Healthy Work-Environment McObject team’s goal is to dedicate their time and effort toward developing the most advanced database technology possible, to provide their customers with outstanding solutions. Therefore, Steven motivates his employees to invest time in learning and communicating any relevant new skills with their co-workers. McObject offers flexible schedules and boosts staff research so that these things can help the company understand, motivate and better provide

We strive to provide our customers with the tools they need to enable optimization of their technology strategy. for its employees. Commenting on this, the versatile leader states “We have a great team that has been working together for years and that thrives on learning on new techniques and testing new ideas in our field.” Due to such healthy work-environment, McObject team was able to develop Active Replication Fabric™ for their clients.

A Versatile Leader Leading McObject towards Success Steven is a seasoned senior executive and technologist in the database software and embedded systems industries. As the CEO of McObject, the dynamic leader has been leading the company towards success. To ensure his business runs smoothly, the first thing Steven does when he wakes up is to check his email to see whether the engineering team has what they need to support their customers and the projects they have in development process. Then, the CEO reviews any product requests received from his existing and potential clients. To keep an eye out on the latest development or technology, he looks at industry relevant daily news and blogs.

Top Three Skills Required to Build a Successful Career According to Steven, there are many skills that can help developers to build a successful career in cloud computing.

Here, he pointed out some skills: adaptability, constant focus, and in-depth knowledge. He shares that individuals should be flexible enough to adapt any changes in this sector. “Those that don’t adapt will find their careers going extinct,” adds Steven. He also suggests that having a constant emphasis and in-depth knowledge of data management practices and techniques will, in turn, give them a competitive edge.

39

Marketing Pulse

How

ANIMATION

Is Ruling The

DIGITAL MARKETING

Industry?

he marketing industry keeps changing every day.

Everyone wants their products to rank number one in the market. To achieve this target, people try all the marketing strategies they can. From using the pictorial form to videos, all mediums are covered in the marketing strategies of competitive firms. Marketing gets tricky with time; a new day introduces a new strategy and a new trend.

Businesses have to be updated because if they are not, the competitors will be.

T

Using animation to the benefit

The visual representation of the product is not only informative but also creative. Animation is the latest form digital marketing is interested in. Animation has changed the course of marketing. Animated videos are a powerful tool to create curiosity. An animated video can sell anything be it a box of cereal or a car. To be more specific, what would you prefer a monologue of a person talking nonstop about the product or a nice, creative, colorful video of the same brand? The audience sure does pick the colorful video. No one wants to listen to a 10 min long introductory monologue. Animation helps to merge information, creativity, and entertainment. The animation industry is not just limited to motion graphics there are other techniques too. To name few, stop motion animation, cut out animation, Claymation, puppet animation, 3D animation or the combination of all. Animation is a free space you can use a single tool or all the tools together to create what you want.

Further, to demonstrate how your product works, motion graphics is an excellent way. Motion graphics uses shapes and illustrations along with text which engages the audience and makes them further curious to understand the video.

Most of the time people see this introductory video just because it is entertaining and people share them, which ultimately benefits with marketing.

40

As proved by the scientists, humans are visually oriented creatures. Humans pick pictures over text. If a picture can have such an effect, then a short video would grab more attention. Social media is the most visited site on the internet and digital marketing works best on social media platforms. Thus, advertising your product through a familiar medium would call more attentiveness to the product.

Additionally, brands are going for animated logos. These logos are seen everywhere and attract the viewer quickly.

The animated logo of Google was very famous because of how uniquely and creatively it was presented. The idea of an animated logo is simple and creative which lures audience on the basis of attractive minute movements and motions. Many companies have started following the same trend. The animated logo creates more impact than a static one. The only trick is to not overdo something. Keep the logo as the prime focus.

Most Scalable THE

Providers of 2019

Keep it simple and creative If the content is engaging and memorable you have your audience’s attention. Making the video engaging and creative all depends on imagination. Likewise, original content gets more valued in the market because creativity is original and never copied. Working on your creativity helps to distinguish the product from others. Being original eliminates the competition which is a good point.

An animated video developed from an original idea simplifies the complexity of the marketing message that you want to convey to your potential customers. Animated videos need balance in elements. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” and thus, if you add too much in the video; the video becomes more complex and misses the whole point of the marketing. It may be entertaining but the marketing of the product is not done. Make it short and creative. The length of the video matters too. If the video is very long, the audience may skip it and move further.

appeal. The length of the videos is averaged to 1 min.

Therefore, while digitally promoting the product, considering the platform would be more beneficial.

To conclude, an animation may seem expensive but it is not. Advertising spends a lot on actors, specific locations, editing and so on. When it comes to animation it just requires a good animator or an animation team. Investing in the animation strategy will improve the digital market. It can be used for digital marketing in countless ways, imagination is the only limit. Animation is not limited to motion graphics; the industry is very vast and keeps growing every day. The techniques used in animation are also improvising daily. Animation can get time-consuming but the results are worth it. Giving animation a try would surely prove beneficial to the digital market. Video is a powerful tool for digital marketing and animated videos add to the benefit of it. Animation is not just cartoons anymore— explore it for your benefit.

Social media platforms and perks Uploading the animated content requires some specifications on social media. When opening any social media site, for instance, Facebook—the ads are auto-played. These ads are by default set to mute. The voiceover of the video is not much focused on. If the content catches the viewer’s eyes then the voice-over is listened to. The content should be informative nonverbally. Also, considering the attention factor, the image should be catchy enough to entice viewers in the first few seconds. Attention also depends on the emotional appeal of the video. If the audience connects to the content they remember it too.

With digital marketing, social media platforms can be used differently. While YouTube is considered, it is an educational, entertainment, or promotional site.

YouTube videos are mostly of long length which can be purely informative or just plain entertaining. However, channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin have a personal

41