When organizations make the choice to put a digital platform in place, a discussion on MicroServices is never far behind. By putting a MicroServices layer in place, an organization creates the springboard to launch into the digital future, whether that involves apps, rich Web clients, or IoT devices such as in-store beacons.
Bitreserve re-launches as cloud based financial service hub Uphold
Cloud based financial exchange Uphold, formerly Bitreserve, has redesigned its functions, products and services for a relaunch. It now aims to connect banks, credit and debit cards and bitcoin to clients’ digital wallets for instant financial services and transactions.
The service, which began as a pure Bitcoin trader, now offers consumers, businesses and charities the option to fund their Uphold accounts via bank transfer or by linking a credit or debit card. The new options are now available in 33 European countries. Uphold said it plans to roll out these services to the United States, China and India by November.
In a four phase rollout out, members in 33 European countries will be able to fund Uphold accounts via bank transfer from October 14th. Meanwhile, clients in 30 European countries can now fund accounts with credit or debit cards. By November 2015 clients in the US and China will be added to the service.
Phase Three, which is scheduled for December 2015, will see Uphold introduce both physical and virtual payment cards with Visa, MasterCard and Discover card, allowing clients to pay merchants online or in-store, directly from their Uphold accounts. The same services are scheduled to be extended to the Indian market in January 2016 in Phase Four of the plan roll-out of cloud services.
The service aims to connect the world’s legacy and fragmented financial networks and systems with a cohesive cloud-money platform, said Uphold CEO Anthony Watson. Uphold said it will bring instant, transparent, accountable and free financial services for all consumers. “We’re simplifying and radically reducing costs for all financial transactions and services – from currency conversions to international money transfers and payroll to bill payment and remittance,” said Watson, “our mission is to make it easy and frictionless for anyone.”
To date, Uphold has powered over $400 million in transactions by tens of thousands of members across 163 countries, in 24 supported currencies and four precious metals. Around 22 per cent of the world’s publicly traded bitcoin has been transacted on Uphold.
SAP unveils new powers within Analytics in the Cloud
SAP has unveiled a new user-friendly analytics service for enterprises which it claims will give better insights by offering an ‘unparalleled user experience’.
The SAP Cloud for Analytics will be delivered through a planned software as a service (SaaS) offering that unifies all SAP’s analytical functions into one convenient dashboard.
Built natively on the SAP HANA Cloud platform, it will be a scalable, multi-tenant environment at a price which SAP says is affordable to companies and individuals. The new offering aims to bring together a variety of existing services including business intelligence, planning, budgeting and predictive capacity.
According to SAP, it has fine tuned workflows so that it’s easier for user to get from insight to action, as one application spirits the uses through this journey more rapidly. It achieves this by giving universal access to all data, digesting it and forwarding the right components to the right organs of the organisation. An intuitive user interface (UI) will help all users, from specialists such as finance professionals to generalists such as line of business analysts, to build connected planning models, analyze data and collaborate. It can extend to unstructured data, helping users to spot market trends within social media and correlate them with company inventories, SAP claims.
It’s all about breaking down the divisions between silos and blending the data to make visualization and forecasting possible, said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “SAP Cloud for Analytics will be a new cloud analytics experience. That to me is more than visualization of data, that’s realization of success,” said Lucas.
SAP said it is also working with partners to provide seamless workflows.
SAP and Google are collaborating to extend the levels of analysis available to customers, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Engineering at Google Apps. “These innovations are planned to allow Google Apps for Work users to embed, refresh and edit SAP Cloud for Analytics content directly in Google Docs and Google Sheets,” said Raghaven.
Performance Testers Secure IT | @DevOps #APM #DevOps #Microservices
You can never be too careful. Security is on everyone’s mind. Not too long ago, we talked about how beefed up security impacts load testing and we want to continue the conversation. How do you keep yourself and your company safe in the age of industrial and state-sponsored hacking? In this post, we’ll outline a few things you must know.
Is Agile Killing Enterprise Architecture? | @CloudExpo #DevOps #Microservices
Maybe EA is essentially governance. If someone from a line of business wants something from IT, they have to pass the request by the EA gatekeepers first. After all, nobody wants duplication or spaghetti integration, right? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. So nothing gets done until EA gives it the stamp of approval.
If that’s the definition of EA, then the first thing we should do is burn that sucker to the ground. There’s no way any organization will ever be agile if there’s a whole department in charge of roadblocks. If Agile is up to the task, then more power to it.
IBM and Etihad Deal
Recently, Etihad Airways has signed a $700 million deal with cloud giant IBM. IBM is set to provide the company’s passengers with cloud computing services that will make air travel easier. This ten year service agreement entails that IBM will provide new information technology services to Etihad and its partner airlines via a new cloud data center in Abu Dhabi. This new data center will be developed and created by IBM. According to Etihad, the center will be one of the most sophisticated of the facilities in the Middle East. As airlines look to reduce line times, they are beginning to invest in IT solutions, as Etihad has with IBM. Cloud technologies will help the airlines improve security while reducing the cost for passengers.
Etihad is the newest addition to the trend of airlines that have adopted cloud-based collaborative decision-making systems. Such systems aim to share important information such as flight departure and arrival times and baggage information. Etihad joins companies such as Lufthansa, who signed a €1 billion IT outsourcing deal with IBM, and British Airways, who signed a deal with Red Hat to increase its cloud computing capabilities.
New technologies may include better luggage drops with label printing and self-boarding gates based on data generated from check-ins, enable airlines to order, replace and maintain aircraft components more efficiently, better estimate travel times, and better manage loyalty programs.
James Hogan, Etihad’s president and chief executive, has commented, “This is a game-changing agreement for Etihad Airways, for our partners and employees, and for Abu Dhabi. This is a long-term, strategic partnership which will allow Etihad Airways and its partners to harness the latest technologies as we deliver our services.” IBM and Etihad will also create a joint technology and innovation council in Abu Dhabi to work on developing more personal travel solutions.
The post IBM and Etihad Deal appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
The Road to Enterprise PaaS | @CloudExpo @RedHatNews #DevOps #BigData #Microservices
Interested in leveraging automation technologies and a cloud architecture to make developers more productive? Learn how PaaS can benefit your organization to help you streamline your application development, allow you to use existing infrastructure and improve operational efficiencies. Begin charting your path to PaaS with OpenShift Enterprise.
How to win with AWS: Five best practice tips
Picture credit: Nandor Fejer/Flickr
As AWS increasingly becomes the preferred deployment model for enterprise applications and services, it’s never been more important for a software or AWS SaaS provider to effectively work with AWS. Many leading technology providers are therefore optimising their software to run on AWS as well as building globally available cloud services delivered through AWS’ worldwide regions.
We’ve had some success on AWS, and thought we’d share some of our learnings in the form of best practices for you to keep in mind when developing your software or SaaS business in this way.
Embrace the change
If you’ve attended the keynote at any recent AWS Summit, you’ve heard the message “cloud is the new normal.” Our advice is to take this to heart, and invest in your business knowing the momentum behind cloud will only continue to accelerate.
This is a boon to businesses of every size and in every location around the world – cloud makes it easier than ever before to innovate, rapidly bring an offering to market, and serve your customer.
Relentlessly focus on the customer experience
Focusing your business on customer success is a must when building a business on AWS.
Why? Because the number one driving factor behind everything AWS does is help its customers be successful and innovative. Tactically, this can mean many things for a SaaS Partner, but the one that stands out is building technology integrations that can provide additional value to AWS customers.
A good example of this involves AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config, services that deliver log data on AWS API calls around user activity and resource changes. When properly harnessed, these services help ensure security and compliance of AWS deployments. A handful of SaaS Partners deliver integrations for these AWS services. The importance of these integrations is clear when you think of how crucial security and compliance are for any successful AWS deployment.
Leverage your customers in your go-to-market strategy
When it comes to building your software or SaaS business on AWS, nothing beats customer validation. One of the most compelling stories is when a customer fully integrates your technology into their AWS strategy.
A great example of this is the Federal Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA is an independent regulator that examines all securities firms and their registered persons and surveils trading on U.S. markets. To respond to rapidly changing market dynamics, FINRA is moving its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to analyse and store approximately 30 billion market events every day. FINRA uses Splunk Cloud to ensure security and compliance in their AWS deployment.
Choose AWS and go “all-in”
When building out your cloud strategy, you have to make choices. Our advice: When two roads diverge in the cloud, choose AWS.
This is a best practice because AWS has the richest and broadest set of services in the market. Whether your offering is storage intensive, computer intensive, or I/O intensive, there are specific solutions for each of them. Regardless of what you need on the infrastructure stack – whether it’s automated provisioning, configuration or management, there is a mature solution that fits the bill.
In addition, business today is global. To successfully grow your business you need the ability to rapidly expand around the world. AWS offers that through their 11 worldwide regions.
Leverage the ecosystem
If you’re building on AWS, chances are that other folks building on AWS will find it useful. This is what makes the AWS announcement of its SaaS Partner Program so exciting. If you’re building a SaaS billing management solution, odds are we could use it for our SaaS operational and security monitoring solution. Since we’re building a SaaS operational and security monitoring solution, odds are you could use it for your SaaS billing management solution. It’s a win-win for all sides.
Adobe and Dropbox team up for easier PDF handling on the go
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Digital giant Adobe and cloud storage provider Dropbox have announced a partnership for more seamless document handling and editing in a variety of locations.
According to Dropbox, there are more than 18 billion PDF files in the storage provider’s repository, being one of the most common business file types in Dropbox. The new partnership enables easier collaboration facilities with Adobe files, including viewing additional actions on PDF files stored in Dropbox Basic, Pro, and Dropbox for Business accounts, as well as edit PDFs via Dropbox through Acrobat DC on desktop or Reader elsewhere.
As a result, it seemed the partnership was a no-brainer from Dropbox’s perspective. “Ultimately, we want you to be able to work with any kind of file easily, from viewing to editing to sharing,” a company blog post reads. “Our collaboration with Adobe, the inventor of the PDF, is the next step in this process.”
“The requirements of our customers have constantly evolved over time; today, mobile has become the rule and people expect to complete work quickly and simply wherever and whenever they need,” added Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and general manager of Adobe Document Cloud. “Our work with Dropbox, as our first file sync and share partner, will help Adobe Document Cloud customers and people around the world be more productive with the documents at the centre of their daily lives.”
This move again highlights the necessity for the cloud storage provider in shaping its operations around the enterprise market. In November last year, Dropbox announced a partnership with Microsoft to entail closer collaboration with Office 365. Figures released by the company in June revealed there were more than eight million Dropbox business customers, compared to their overall total of 400 million.
Putting the Test Back into DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #BigData #Microservices
DevOps has become synonymous with empowering developers to move faster and deliver more software, but has unintentionally moved software quality and testing into a corner. The pendulum that swings back and forth between very slow testing and staying far away from overly technical solutions has swung hard with DevOps, completely ignoring the value that testers can bring by forcing customers to test new code and creating teams that rely monitoring systems to find things that could have been caught before customers noticed.