I recently had another client conversation about optimizing their data warehouse and Business Intelligence (BI) environment. The client had lots of pride in their existing data warehouse and business intelligence accomplishments, and rightfully so. The heart of the conversation was about taking costs out of their reporting environments by consolidating runaway data marts and “spreadmarts[1],” and improving business analyst BI self-sufficiency.

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«Cloud4U builds software services that help people build DevOps platforms for cloud-based software and using our platform people can draw a picture of the system, network, software,» explained Kihyeon Kim, CEO and Head of R&D at Cloud4U, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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The nature of test environments is inherently temporary—you set up an environment, run through an automated test suite, and then tear down the environment. If you can reduce the cycle time for this process down to hours or minutes, then you may be able to cut your test environment budgets considerably.
The impact of cloud adoption on test environments is a valuable advancement in both cost savings and agility. The on-demand model takes advantage of public cloud APIs requiring only payment for the time needed to run automated tests. In this framework, success depends on two things: automated infrastructure and automated acceptance tests. If these two goals can be achieved, the cost savings from reduced infrastructure spend and the increase in agility will more than pay for the cost of both automation initiatives.

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Salesforce has joined hands with the leading force in the containerisation space, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF),

Being the owner of Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool, the CNCF has gained momentum recently with a large number of renowned cloud technology companies joining it in 2017 such as AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, and Pivotal.

Salesforce, although a Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, has realised that containerisation provides a way to more tightly control the development process and seeks to gain a piece of the action from this association.

Mark Interrante, SVP Engineering at Salesforce announced the partnership in a blog post on Medium and said it is imperative to adopt new technologies like Kubernetes quickly as they help create products faster and easier.

He said, “We’ve seen how containerization simplifies the orchestration of software across a large fleet of servers. Kubernetes makes a great foundation for continuous innovation/continuous delivery which then improves our software delivery. This kind of collaboration, with Salesforce as an active participant in open technology ecosystems, is key to helping us move forward.”

Salesforce’s development teams have adopted many of the CNCF tools apart from Kubernetes.

Yesterday, we highlighted a range of new and updated projects from the CNCF.

What are your thoughts on Salesforce joining the CNCF? Let us know in the comments.

identify the sources of event storms and performance anomalies will require automated, real-time root-cause analysis.
I think Enterprise Management Associates said it well:
“The data and metrics collected at instrumentation points across the application ecosystem are essential to performance monitoring and root cause analysis.
However, analytics capable of transforming data and metrics into an application-focused report or dashboards are what separates actual application monitoring from relatively simple silo monitoring.

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Agile has finally jumped the technology shark, expanding outside the software world. Enterprises are now increasingly adopting Agile practices across their organizations in order to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them. In our quest for establishing change as a core competency in our organizations, this business-centric notion of Agile is an essential component of Agile Digital Transformation.
In the years since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, the connection between building better software and business agility has been a tenuous one at best. But now that Agile is maturing and Digital Transformation is driving change across enterprises large and small, companies are realizing that their best bet for achieving business agility is to take the best of Agile and apply it across the entire organization.

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To get the most out of their data, successful companies are not focusing on queries and data lakes, they are actively integrating analytics into their operations with a data-first application development approach. Real-time adjustments to improve revenues, reduce costs, or mitigate risk rely on applications that minimize latency on a variety of data sources. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Jack Norris, Senior Vice President, Data and Applications at MapR Technologies, reviewed best practices to show how companies develop, deploy, and dynamically update these applications and how this data-first approach is fundamentally different from traditional applications. He covered examples of how leading companies have identified ways to simplify data streams in a publish-and-subscribe framework (for example, how focusing on a stream of electronic medical records simplified the deployment of real-time applications for hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies). He also detailed how a data-first approach can lead to rapid deployment of additional real-time applications as well as centralize and simplify many data management and administration tasks.

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Long-term partners Fujitsu Limited and Citrix Systems Japan have announced a new virtual desktop service based in the cloud. Designed to take some of the pain out of digital transformation, the new offering makes it easier to create digital workspaces in a secure manner that’s scalable.
The Fujitsu Managed Infrastructure Service Virtual Desktop Service VCC (Virtual Client on Cloud) employs the Citrix suite of virtual desktop infrastructure products, including Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, and Citrix ShareFile. The two companies have been working together in the VDI space for decades, but this new agreement enables Fujitsu to sell the new service.

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Many enterprise and government IT organizations are realizing the benefits of cloud computing by extending IT delivery and management processes across private and public cloud services. But they are often challenged with balancing the need for centralized cloud governance without stifling user-driven innovation.
This strategy requires an approach that fundamentally reshapes how IT is delivered today, shifting the focus from infrastructure to services aggregation, and mixing and matching the best services for meeting organizations’ current and future needs.

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