We’ve all heard or read about the reasons Agile is good from the business or project management perspectives, but when it really comes down to it, how much do those reasons actually move the needle for the people on the front lines who are trying to implement Agile?

As the Agile team becomes more efficient and successful, they begin to wonder how they can extend these benefits beyond the development team. I suspect that the success of Agile teams was one of the reasons for the birth of the DevOps movement, as development teams began to wonder about whether they could extend Agile towards concepts like continuous delivery or deployment, and began to pull in their IT Operations brethren.
In organizations that are successfully practicing Agile or DevOps, the DBA team is starting to think through how they will support all of this increased release velocity. Historically suspicious of automation, and for good reason, the DBA team is starting to acknowledge that the manual processes and script writing they’ve depended upon will hamper their ability to keep up with development and operations. They’re beginning to wonder if there’s a better way for them – a way in which they can safely and reliably support the increased velocity from Agile workflows without losing control…

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«Vormetric is a data security company. We secure information at rest and our customers are some of the largest organizations in the world. The threats that are coming around today are either from state-sponsored activities and organized crime, and the intent is to steal information,» explained Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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In his session at DevOps Summit, Andrei Yurkevich, CTO at Altoros, provided an overview of all the benefits and opportunities, as well as drawbacks of deploying Cloud Foundry PaaS with Juju and compared it to BOSH. Discover the features that overlap, and understand what Juju Charm is, what it is not, where you use one or the other or where you use both BOSH and Juju Charms together.
Andrei Yurkevich is Cloud Foundry protagonist and CTO at Altoros. Under his supervision, the Altoros engineering team has grown from zero to more than 250 specialists across seven global locations. Currently, he is responsible for technology alliances in Platform-as-a-Service, Big Data, and Cloud Automation.

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(c)iStock.com/vertigo3D

SAP has released its latest financial figures, and it’s to be expected; cloud subscriptions up, software subscriptions down, overall numbers ticking over, and a pledge that cloud profits will exceed software license revenues by 2018.

The company has again shifted its long term goals, with a 2017 operating profit target now of €6.3bn to €7bn, from a previous total of €7.7bn – and it’s all due to the company’s aggressive shift towards cloud.

The full year figures weren’t anything to write home about, but it’s all going in the right direction. Non-IFRS operating profit stood at €5.64bn for 2014, an uptick of 3% on the year before, while total revenue stood at €17.58bn, an increase of 4%.

The meatiest figures however were in the software and support sections. Cloud subscriptions and support went up 45% year on year to €1.1bn, while traditional software numbers were down 3%, to €4.4bn.

This is committed business that will drive strong cloud growth in the future

“We had exceptional growth in our cloud business and have significantly lifted the total of cloud backlog and non-IFRS deferred cloud revenue to more than €3 billion,” commented Luka Mucic, SAP chief financial officer. “This is committed business that will drive strong cloud growth in the future.

“We expect cloud subscriptions to exceed software license revenue in 2018,” he added. “At that time SAP expects to reach a scale in its cloud business that will clear the way for accelerated operating profit expansion.”

Back in October this publication mused that SAP was doing a little better financially than its two main competitors in the race to the cloud; namely Oracle and IBM, not to mention the likes of Salesforce breathing down its neck. SAP’s recent acquisitions, including software firm Concur Technologies, as well as its ambition to move towards an agile startup mentality, shows this.

The German tech giant gained almost 8,000 employees over the course of the year, doubling down on their commitment to increasing its workforce despite fears over job cuts last year. Yet the shift to the right on operating profit predictions shows there’s still a lot of work to do.

You can read the full financial statement here.

Picture credit: Cookie Jam/YouTube

Social Gaming Network (SGN) has partnered with NoSQL database provider Couchbase to rapidly scale and maintain uptime for its Cookie Jam game, which boasts over 5 million users worldwide.

The match-3 puzzle game was named by social network Facebook as its most popular game of 2014, with Facebook head of games partnerships EMEA Bob Slinn telling the Guardian it was “an amazing success story.” Part of that success has to go down to Couchbase, which itself has more than doubled in size over the past year.

The clear challenge facing Couchbase, as is often the case for social and mobile hits, is how to expect a huge spike and scale quickly enough to avoid downtime. Regular readers of this publication will note a similar pattern with Heroku after it powered social network Ello, which was described as an “overnight success.”

As a result, SGN tested the software to its limits and found good results, according to Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. “Certainly with gaming companies, we can see huge spikes,” he tells CloudTech. “It’s hard to predict when they’re going to happen, and so that’s why for social gaming companies in particular, it’s the hits business – you can have very rapid unexpected downloads and usage of product.”

If there is an unexpected jump, then SGN can add additional nodes in a matter of minutes. “That’s an industry vertical that needs to be able to very rapidly scale without any problems, and that’s one of the reasons Couchbase has been so successful in the social and mobile gaming space,” Wiederhold explains.

One of the key challenges facing Couchbase is identifying exactly where the bottlenecks are. “Oftentimes it has very little to do with the database,” Wiederhold says. “When these social gaming companies are scaling for the first time, they run into previously unknown issues, so we work with them closely to diagnose problems and remove those bottlenecks so they can scale without ever going down.

“These problems are usually not catastrophic in the sense that it causes the game to go down,” he adds. “We’re very proud of the fact that we work with many of these gaming companies where they’ve gone through hyper-viral growth and they’ve never gone down even for a minute, but behind the scenes they’re looking at a lot of different things.”

Wiederhold praised SGN for getting its testing and due diligence sorted. “[Some companies] like one product or another, but they never put it through its paces, never stress test it, never test to see if we get some crazy spike of users, and those are the companies that we typically see get into trouble and call us after the fact and try and figure out how to retrofit their game to use Couchbase,” he says.

“SGN has a lot of experience with Couchbase now on multiple games, so that’s not the situation with them.”

For the future, Wiederhold stresses a continued move towards disrupting the legacy database market of Oracle, SAP, IBM et al, with expansion into Asia part of Couchbase’s plan. “We are regularly replacing Oracle in particular, because it has the biggest footprint in the market,” he says.

“That is happening, and probably 60% of the enterprise deployments for mission critical, business critical apps are replacing legacy relational technologies.”

Ninety-percent of your users want your site to perform well during peak periods, like the last month or so. That’s according to a study by Compuware, in which they also found that most dissatisfied users will throw you under a bus if your app or site performs poorly while they’re desperately trying to buy the right gift for their very demanding loved ones.
In an application world driven by impatient and very vocal users, performance is king. Every year before Christmas we hear at least one horror story of a site that didn’t perform up to expectations and is promptly made an example by, well, everyone. I could probably fill this post with examples, but that’s not really the point. The point is maybe there’s a way to counteract that, in real time, thanks to the power of programmability in the network.

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Almost everyone sees the potential of Internet of Things but how can businesses truly unlock that potential. The key will be in the ability to discover business insight in the midst of an ocean of Big Data generated from billions of embedded devices via Systems of Discover. Businesses will also need to ensure that they can sustain that insight by leveraging the cloud for global reach, scale and elasticity.

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With all the news these days about cyberterrorism and hacking the cloud may seem like the last place you would want to put your precious information. Pew Research has even suggested that cyber-attacks are likely to increase. Some 61% of over 1600 security expert respondents to a recent survey said «yes» that a major attack causing widespread harm would occur by 2025,according to the Pew Research study. The cold hard fact, however, is that fear of the cyberterrorist and hackers, while definitely valid, is mostly misplaced. I hold this contrarian view, because when you pull back the curtain on many of the recent breaches, you’ll likely see a mirror.

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Xero small business accounting software believes SaaS (software as a service) and especially mobile accounting software is the way to empower small business in a way that can influence whole countries’ gross domestic products (GDP.) Today we embark to learn just how this can be true.

The kiwi company was founded in 2006. In 2012, former Sage-employee Jamie Sutherland was tasked with opening the U.S. office, which now has 150 employees in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Denver.

Xero U.S. President Sutherland decided to make a switch from world’s third largest ERP (enterprise resource planning software) U.K.-based Sage to Xero because he just felt everything it was working toward just made sense with how he saw the future of business software.

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Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, but deploying in the cloud holds great promise for changing all of that.
Time is probably the most valuable commodity in business. «Time is money» is a trite way of saying that those who move the quickest are usually the ones who get the loot.
But current database technology is anything but timely. Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, and more often than not produce valuable results only after hours of number crunching. And with Big Data, social networking, the Internet of Things and other data-intensive workloads on the near horizon, database functionality is likely to become slower still.

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