Category Archives: Tools

Android, Cloud & IT Management, MDM, Mobile, Mobile device management, Tools

ManageEngine Adds Android Mobile Device Management

ManageEngine today announced it now manages Android devices in the latest version of its desktop and mobile device management (MDM) software, Desktop Central. The move extends the mobile device management support in Desktop Central to include smartphones and tablets running Google’s popular mobile OS as well as devices running Apple iOS.

“The mobile usage trends will eventually drive sharp increases in demand for enterprise MDM solutions that embrace BYOD while ensuring enterprise data security,” said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “The growing Android market and increasing demand for Android support among our customer base encouraged us to add Android support to Desktop Central as quickly as possible.”

Android MDM in Desktop Central provides data wipe, mobile application management, configuring profile/policy and default option to run mandatory background applications

Desktop Central 8 is available immediately. Prices start at $10 per computer annually for the Professional Edition. The MDM add-on module support is available on all the editions, and prices start at $15 per device annually. The Free Edition of Desktop Central manages up to 25 computers and two mobile devices. A free, fully-functional trial version is available at http://www.manageengine.com/products/desktop-central/download.html.

Ben Evans, Garbage Collection, Internet Technology, Java, Java Virtual Machine, Tools

jClarity Launches Java Optimization Tool

Java startup jClarity just  unveiled their first analysis tool, jClarity Censum, designed to assist developers with Java issues.

Founded in 2012, jClarity is a London-based tech start-up that creates intelligent products to optimize Java.  The company is headed up by Java technologists and regular conference speakers Ben Evans, Martijn Verburg and Kirk Pepperdine.

jClarity Censum is the team’s initial product, offering analytics and insight as opposed to solely supplying raw data. The program defines Garbage Collection (GC) performance problems in plain English and advises how to fix them. GC is a difficult, specialized area that can be very frustrating for busy developers, devops and operations teams. Easy to install and use, jClarity Censum delivers the parsing, number crunching and statistical analysis in order to solve GC performance issues and provides solid recommendations to act upon.

“Through jClarity, we want to build products and services that truly bring change to the Java / JVM landscape and Cloud performance space” says CEO Ben Evans. “Censum advises developers what to do when Java falls over in an easily comprehensive manner, removing the need for a PhD in Computer Science.”

jClarity is backed by Aimar Capital, a technology-based venture capital fund based in London and New York.

jClarity Censum is available to download at www.jclarity.com for £595 per user per year.

CCN, NetDNA, Tools

New NetDNA Platform Lets Developers Embed CDN Services Into Web Apps, Services

NetDNA today announced the NetDNA Acceleration Platform, a content delivery network (CDN) service that allows developers to embed web acceleration capabilities into their web services and applications.

The new platform redefines how deeply integrated CDN services can be in a web service or platform.  NetDNA Acceleration Platform gives web developers control over CDN provisioning either to resell CDN services to their customers through their apps, or for competitive advantage as extra site performance or a free customer feature.

Early customer Player.IO, a game developer network, uses the NetDNA Acceleration Platform as a part of its service, helping to make the games developed on its network faster and more successful.

WPEngine, a hassle-free and high-performance Word Press hosting service lets its customers that need performance add a CDN to their site using the self-managing control panel right from the WPEngine user interface. The service makes it easy for WPEngine to handle thousands of CDN zones in its platform.

The NetDNA Acceleration Platform leverages NetDNA’s worldwide network of edge servers and adds to that a new representational state transfer (REST) -based API for web application integration and a very powerful control panel that lets developers completely manage their services.

Demand for CDN services has skyrocketed with market analysts expecting 25 percent to 30 percent annual market growth between now and 2017.  That growth reflects how essential CDNs are becoming to most websites, helping to improve search engine optimization, customer satisfaction and e-commerce sales.

“Slow web performance is a significant pain point for websites and Internet businesses of all sizes.  With NetDNA Acceleration Platform, we are expanding the market for CDN services by enabling developers to pass on web acceleration to their customers,” said Chris Ueland, Co-Founder and President of NetDNA.  “Our goal is that CDN services become a widespread feature of web apps giving all Internet sites the capability to deliver optimal performance.”

The NetDNA Acceleration Platform control panel provides total self-management of all CDN-related services and features.  It can be accessed on computers or using iOS or Android tablets and smartphones.  The control panel allows self-management of all CDN functionality including instant zone creation, cache-setting adjustments, instant purge, CNAME manager and the ability to instantly set up an SSL service.

The REST API allows developers to create a plug-in that allows users to provision a new CDN with changes taking effect across the network in minutes

Developers can also use the REST API to build access to any feature or function found in the control panel into their apps or services.  The API includes functions to create, modify and delete zones, prime and purge cache files, list and update users and create all of the various reports.

To help ease integration, the NetDNA Acceleration Platform features a developer’s center (developer.netdna.com) with tools and sample code that developers can use to test drive their implementation and simplify their integration and testing of the CDN. The developer’s center features libraries for PERL, PhP, Microsoft .net, Python and Ruby on Rails.

NetDNA Acceleration Platform is available now.  Pricing depends on data volume, and starts at $800.


Mobile, Mobile application development, SOASTA, Tools

SOASTA Launches Mobile Services Division

Cloud and mobile testing provider SOASTA today announced the launch of its Mobile Services Division (MSD) to help companies deliver  quality user experience for their mobile and web apps. SOASTA’s MSD, headed by mobile testing and big-data industry veteran Mahesh Gidwani, focuses on helping its customers build and manage mobile test labs by combining SOASTA’s best practices and proven test methodologies to ensure successful mobile application delivery using the company’s CloudTest, TouchTest, and mPulse products.

In addition to SOASTA’s own MSD, SOASTA is also introducing a Mobile Test Automation Network made up of mobile test professionals from around the world that will be accredited to deliver SOASTA’s mobile test methodologies. Joining this network today are partners focused on Mobile Test Automation including ProtoTest, Total Performance Consulting and Utopia Solutions, that extend SOASTA’s services reach to clients across geographies and industry verticals.

“The explosion of mobile development has created a capability gap in the services market that SOASTA uniquely fills with our elite team of experts and partners who have pioneered mobile test automation and cloud testing,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “We launched the SOASTA Mobile Services Division after our customers told us that they often lacked the expertise to implement and execute effective mobile and cloud-based testing strategies.”

“As enterprises struggle to match the pace of consumer demand via mobile and web properties, they are finding it hard to adapt their quality processes,” said Tom Murphy, Gartner Research Director. “Gartner sees the growth and expansion of specialized professional services as a natural response to the market need.”

The new Mobile Services offered by SOASTA span strategy, methodology, accreditation, implementation and ad-hoc services focused on:

  • Mobile Test Automation Architects (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Mobile Test Automation Experts (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Mobile Performance Engineers (On-Demand, On-Premise)
  • Continuous Integration Test Methodologies
  • Building and Management Services for Internal and External Mobile
    Application Test Labs
  • Mobile App Testing Accreditation

“The demand for mobile testing expertise, coupled with the compression of delivery cycles, drives growth for our specialized services,” said Lee Barnes, the founder and CTO of Utopia Solutions. “With this expansion, joint SOASTA and Utopia customers will experience rapid return and expert guidance of seasoned mobile testing experts resulting in the highest quality mobile apps to their end-users.”

“I’m excited to be leading the charge into mobile test services for SOASTA,” said Mahesh Gidwani, SOASTA’s new VP, Professional Services. “SOASTA is excited match our product innovations with equally innovative services that help our customers with mobile automation.”


SmartBear Software, TestComplete, Tools

LoadComplete Aims to Simplify Analysis of Web Performance Data

With LoadComplete 2.6 by SmartBear Software, available today, organizations can load and stress test their Web applications on premise or from Amazon cloud, offering the best of both worlds—agility of on-premise deployment and scale of load generation from the cloud.

“In working with dozens of performance testing tools in my career, I’ve learned that the key to success is having the right tools available at exactly the right time,” said Rick Cavallaro, owner, RJCadvisors, Inc. “While executing load tests and setting up automated testing solutions for customers, I am often brought in late in the process so the window to execute the tests is very short. LoadComplete 2.6 allows me to apply the load very quickly, and in turn, get to the measurements quickly.”

LoadComplete is a proven and affordable performance, stress and load testing tool from the makers of the award winning functional testing tools – TestComplete and soapUI. Designed from the ground up to help users focus on key business tasks of performance testing, it requires no programming knowledge to start and accelerates workflow with automation and wizards. With LoadComplete, users can record and play user scenarios and optimize the load model using the freehand workload modeling tool. LoadComplete collects server performance data and integrates it in performance reports.


Application programming interface, Big Data, Database, NoSQL, Relational database, SQL, Tools

FairComs Newest c-treeACE Bridges SQL, NoSQL Worlds

FairCom today announced the tenth major edition of its cross-platform database technology, c-treeACE® V10, that introduces the industry’s first Relational Multi-Record Type support for seamless integration between relational and non-relational database worlds.

c-treeACE V10 also delivers features such as new Java interfaces, performance and scalability enhancements, additional platform support, and new replication models. With this latest version come significant performance gains including 30 percent faster transaction throughput, 60 percent faster SQL performance, 200 percent better replication throughput, and 26 percent faster read performance.

“The database market is growing substantially, yet there are many problems plaguing developers today: large data volumes; requirements to reduce data access time; data access requirements from a myriad of new locations, like mobile devices and the cloud; trickier integration; and decreasing budgets,” said Randal Hoff, FairCom’s VP of Engineering. “Engineers tell us they really need technology that enables them to work seamlessly within both the relational and non-relational worlds. In the past, they’ve felt forced to choose one or the other, when, in fact, they realize concrete benefits from both. Our newest c-treeACE gives them the flexibility to enjoy the best of both worlds: high performance data throughput levels that a NoSQL database can provide; and concurrent relational access for ease of data sharing with other parts of the enterprise, including cloud and mobile devices, all at a reasonable price point.”

For more than 30 years, FairCom has provided a unique model to enterprise database developers and ISVs not available from off-the-shelf databases. Its c-treeACE offers the highest levels of tailored configuration and control while simultaneously supporting a variety of non-relational API’s (e.g., ISAM, .NET, and JTDB) along with industry-standard relational API’s (e.g., SQL, JDBC, ODBC, PHP, Python, etc.) within the same application, over the same data. Enterprises such as Federal Express, Microsoft, NASA and Visa have used FairCom technology in mission-critical solutions.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50473561&lang=en


NCR Corporation, Telecommunications Industry, Tools

NCR Introduces Cloud-based Managed IT Domain Service for Telecom Carriers

NCR Corporation today launched Managed IT Domain Services, a managed service for telecommunications carriers and technology manufacturers (OEMs), which enables support for remote monitoring and management of enterprise customers’ IT domains, through cloud-based IT infrastructures.

The total service supports applications, cloud, network/WAN, security, server, storage and virtualization. More than 3,000 products from many leading networking and IT vendors can be managed. Components include a network operations center, which will monitor, identify and resolve IT infrastructure irregularities, a service desk for end-to-end incident management and a self-service portal for customers to track the real-time status of their managed environment and view key performance indicators and other metrics.

“Many CIOs today are transitioning business functions into the cloud to realize cost-savings, increase productivity and reinvent business agility,” said Nadine Routhier, vice president, NCR Telecommunications and Technology. “We’re creating exceptional value for telecom and OEM’s companies by enabling them to quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet growing demand for cloud-based services, without making extensive capital investments.”

Sophisticated configuration management and analytics tools are also included in the service to maximize network availability and reduce on-site support costs, including remote restoration and updates to managed devices. NCR research shows that 98 percent of availability issues identified through the service can be resolved remotely, and resolution time can be reduced by up to 60 percent versus traditional on-site support. Network operational data is also continuously analyzed in order to provide proactive recommendations to further enhance availability and up-time, which is critical to the success of enterprise cloud computing initiatives.


Adaptive Computing, Tools

Moab Cloud Suite 7.2 Speeds Cloud Deployment

 

Image representing Adaptive Computing as depic...

Adaptive Computing today announced the release of Moab Cloud Suite 7.2. Now Moab Cloud Suite provides improved time to cloud deployment offering out-of-the-box integration with existing infrastructure, minimizing system upgrades by leveraging existing investments. It also enables IT departments to more easily meet the needs of different organizational groups by streamlining tasks with a new dashboard portal and automating budget allocation.

Moab facilitates the deployment of private clouds by optimizing existing infrastructure components to make the most of current investments. It integrates easily with virtualization, management and other cloud platforms, such as the new VMware Center connector (Moab Cloud Suite vCenter Connector), HP Cloud Services Automation Connector (HP CSA) and more (to be released soon).

Moab Cloud Suite vCenter Connector enables the metrics of virtualized resources to be utilized to drive Moab automation and optimization policies for the cloud environment. This extends the value of the customer’s existing VMware investments. Vendor lock-in is also avoided as other hypervisor and management tool metrics can also be leveraged for cloud management and policies through extensible Moab Web Services.

Moab Cloud Suite HP CSA Connector allows Moab’s patented intelligence engine policies to optimize service placement and performance while maximizing utilization as part of the HP CSA cloud solution. This connector is currently available through HP and HP partners.

The streamlined dashboard portal enables users and admins to be more productive by grouping the needed data views and management actions together for common tasks so they can be accomplished quicker and easier. Key subjects are listed with every relevant action in easy-to-navigate panes, and dashboard filters allowing multiple filtering options to speed common cloud requests and status tasks. In addition, dashboards now show more actionable data, summarized in a comprehensible at-a-glance format with improved data list views and one-click drill downs on almost any data item. These new dashboard features give admins aggregate and summarized data to provide a better overall picture of their current cloud conditions.


DataDirect, Enterprise Service Bus, Progress, Tools

Progress Software Offers DataDirect Cloud Connectivity Management Service

Progress Software Corporation today announced it’s offering a beta program of the DataDirect® Cloud service. The new SaaS-based connection management service is a key step in the company’s mission to help organizations create, run and connect to the world’s best business applications. The cloud connectivity service enables simplified SQL access to a broad spectrum of cloud-based data sources through a single standards-based interface.

Cloud is reshaping the way organizations build and deploy software and enabling the next generation of ISVs and applications to be built in less time, at less cost, all the while increasing application scalability and resilience. With the acknowledged value of cloud, there’s been an explosion of new data sources in the cloud such as SaaS CRM, Social Network Feeds, and SaaS ERP. Organizations seeking to unlock the data in these sources need an easy way to connect to them. Point-to-point connectivity might be available through a proprietary web service, but creating unique access calls that conform to multiple APIs is unwieldy and complex. The multitude of different API’s as well as their various versions is making applications too complex to maintain.

Connectivity-as-a-Service provides standards-based SQL access to cloud data without requiring customized interfaces or new libraries to learn. It executes the SQL query against the appropriate cloud data source, managing all of the complexity, API’s, and versioning itself so that the application does not have to.

The DataDirect Cloud offering provides:

  • A single ODBC and JDBC driver based on the DataDirect premium driver
    technology that plugs into almost any 3rd party application
    suite (i.e., Business Intelligence, Enterprise Service Bus, Business
    Process Management Suites, Data Integration ETL, Java EE)
  • Real-time SQL access to a broad spectrum of data sources through a
    connectivity management service that resides in the cloud
  • Web based query development tools that allow interaction with SaaS
    data without any on-premise software required
  • Elastic scalability suitable for the most demanding data access needs
  • Specifically for ISVs, the ability to distribute the DataDirect Cloud
    OEM driver “in the box” and support a broad array of data sources that
    will be updated and expanded regularly without having to redeploy to
    on premise installations.


Application programming interface, Tinypass, Tools

Tinypass Launches Cloud-Based, Content Metering Tool for its Digital Paywall Platform

Tinypass, a flexible and consumer-friendly paywall platform for digital publishers, announced today a new content metering capability that allows publishers to provide a specified amount of free – or “metered” – access to their site’s content before visitors are asked to pay. The technology offers publishers a broad range of control in implementing a metered access model, enabling them to set the amount of free content users are able to view based upon either the number of articles/resources retrieved or by time frame. For example, offering 24-hours of free access to allow visitors to preview site offerings.

“We’re committed to empowering digital publishers with the ability to monetize their content in effective, affordable and consumer-friendly ways,” said David Restrepo, Chief Operating Officer of Tinypass. “What’s great about the new, metered access capability is that it allows content owners of any size to quickly and easily implement a customized access model that their visitors will already be familiar with from experience accessing content on the sites of several of the world’s largest publishers. Like the rest of our cloud-based technology platform, the metering tools are completely scalable and, with zero upfront costs, can be deployed by operators of all sizes.”

The metering functionality is built into Tinypass’ plugins for WordPress and Drupal, as well as Tinypass’ PHP- and Java-based APIs. Media owners Worldcrunch, Summit Business Media and the Chicago Phoenix are among the first publishers to begin rolling out the new meter tool on their sites.

In addition to offering site owners a choice between a quantity or time frame approach, the Tinypass metering tool can be implemented in two separate technology modes – a client-side mode or a client- and server-side mode. The client-side mode operates in a manner similar to the paywall offerings of the New York Times and The Financial Times and works through cookies added to the user’s browser. After users have accessed a preset amount of free content, they are asked to create an account to continue reading.

A more secure approach includes both client- and server-side user confirmation. The addition of a small amount of code to the publisher’s content management system (CMS) prevents users from circumventing the access meter simply by clearing the cookies in his or her browser.

Using the Tinypass meter, publishers are free to make their own decisions in regards to inbound, referring links to their site. Visits that originate from social networking and other news sharing sites can be counted against the meter or treated as separate interactions that do not count against free views.