IDG Contributor Network: Rise of the SPI: Atlassian spin or a better variation of the API?

I’ve long been a proponent of organizations that have an API-driven strategy. API (Application Programming Interface) is a term used to describe the technical integration points between applications, between devices and between services. It is, for want of a better analogy, the small piece of code that acts as the universal socket into which other tools, products or devices can plug. In a time where legendary venture capitalist and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen famously quipped that software is eating the world, APIs are the technology pieces that give software teeth.So, given my bullishness about the API space, I was interested to hear from Atlassian about a new concept, Service Provider Interfaces (SPIs), and how they can do more, be more and achieve more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Sage delivers a payments API. Because APIs are the key to unlocking the future

Until very recently, the accounting software industry was evenly split among the "big three" vendors: Sage broadly owned the U.K. market, Intuit the American, and MYOB the Australasian. Bit players rounded out the other countries not covered by these big three.But in the past few years, several innovative new companies have been founded with the stated aim of disrupting these big vendors. Most notable among them is Xero, but similarly FreshBooks, Kashflow, FreeAgent and others had a crack at the problem space.+ Also on Network World: 10 free tools for API design, development and testing +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Realm broadens its mobile database offering with Object Server

Realm provides a database tailored for mobile applications. The most popular third-party database globally, Realm powers apps in use by over a billion users. Realm has focused on the mobile side of things and offers caching and synchronization services that are critical for the mobile use case.The company is broadening its offering today with the announcement of the Realm Mobile Platform, an amalgam of the existing database and a new product, Realm Object Server.Object Server deals with delivering live data synchronization between users. In practice, it uses live objects across both database and server, which update automatically in response to changes on either side. These objects are then integrated between the two ends of the chain, with data encrypted throughout the process. The use cases for this two-way synchronicity are obvious: Messaging and chat, live collaboration, two-way data syncing and offline functionality are all enabled by this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cloudways choses Kyup to power its container-based hosting

Cloudways is a cloud platform offering support for organizations that need to run web-applications. Competing with other web-application hosting services like Pantheon and Pressable, Cloudways offers applications such as ecommerce, content management systems and blogging platforms.Basically the idea is that if you’re a content producer, you can rely on Cloudways to ensure that your site stays up regardless of traffic spikes, application updates or security issues. Instead of picking a standard cloud or hosting provider and doing the heavy lifting of the application-specific stuff yourself, you rely on Cloudways to do that for you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Zuznow (who?) offers a Siri-like tool for developers

Zuznow is a little-known vendor that offers a mobile development platform. Essentially Zuznow is focused on enabling businesses, even those businesses without technical development resource on staff, to create mobile applications. It’s a busy space, and it's getting busier—large vendors (Salesforce, BMC), smaller vendors (Caspio, Mendix) and standalone mobile application development platforms (Xamarin) are all trying to solve this problem.+ Also on Network World: Will companies trust their communications to AI chatbots? + Zuznow wants to steal a march on the opposition with the introduction of its intelligent voice assistant. The tool can be thought of as a plug-and-play Siri. Indeed Zuznow has even called the offering Susie, as an homage of Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Zuznow promises that it is delivering the world's first intelligent assistant plugin that brings voice-control and chatbots to any enterprise mobile app within hours. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: In an attempt to disrupt Splunk, Elastic makes another acquisition

Elastic is the commercial vendor that sits behind the Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and Beats open source projects. Elasticsearch was created back in 2010 by Shay Banon, co-founder and CTO of the Elastic company, and is built upon the Apache Lucene information retrieval project. All of the different projects focus on taking structured and unstructured data and delivering search, logging and analytics on top of it.Since that time, its commercial products—Elastic Stack, X-Pack and Elastic Cloud—have seen over 70 million cumulative downloads.Elastic has been smart about making strategic acquisitions. It acquired visualization vendor Kibana, and a year or so ago it acquired Norwegian company Found, which was commercializing Elasticsearch and offering it as a service on top of Amazon Web Services. This strategy appears to have worked, and it is interesting to look at the graph below that tracks the relative exposure of Elasticsearch and one of the competitive offerings, Splunk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: GitLab fills need for enterprise developer tools, picks up funding round

Recently I chatted with Dawie Olivier, the CIO of Westpac Bank. Olivier has a long history within the financial services industry, and we talked about helping these kinds of organizations become agile and innovative.This is no small challenge (I’ll share more about my interview with Olivier in a future post). Financial services organizations work within a highly regulated industry and are doubly confounded by often being built on top of big, heavy, monolithic, legacy IT systems. Hardly a recipe for agility.+ Also on Network World: Promise and peril in the journey to DevOps +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Newly public Twilio moves up the food chain

There is a typical model for growing technology companies once they pass their IPO milestones—a move towards quickly broadening the product base to derive additional revenue in order to keep the Wall Street analysts happy. Given there has been a dearth of tech IPOs lately—and that one of the ones that did get away, Twilio, is widely regarded as a tech success story—it is interesting to watch what the company rolls out in the short term.We didn’t have to wait long. Twilio today announced a new enterprise plan that not only ticks the analyst boxes for potential increased revenue, but also ticks enterprise boxes for security and administration control.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: HashiCorp slurps up cash to deliver DevOps goodness

Seemingly every company under the sun is now a DevOps leader—even ones that, while purporting to be about a new way of doing things, continue to market legacy, monolithic products and services.  So, it’s nice to see some genuine players achieve success and recognition in this space. A good example of this is HashiCorp—an important, but little-known DevOps vendor. The company manages a host of open-source tools, all of which tick of different parts of the application and infrastructure lifecycle. + Also on Network World: The shift to DevOps requires a new approach to security +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: HashiCorp slurps up cash to deliver DevOps goodness

Seemingly every company under the sun is now a DevOps leader—even ones that, while purporting to be about a new way of doing things, continue to market legacy, monolithic products and services.  So, it’s nice to see some genuine players achieve success and recognition in this space. A good example of this is HashiCorp—an important, but little-known DevOps vendor. The company manages a host of open-source tools, all of which tick of different parts of the application and infrastructure lifecycle. + Also on Network World: The shift to DevOps requires a new approach to security +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cambium Networks helps provide the network for the IoT

We here a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Call it the IoT, the industrial internet, the internet of customers or some other variation on a theme, but it means essentially the same thing—devices and sensors in a dizzying variety of different locations being connected and able to exchange data. But many of the use cases we see for IoT are pretty lightweight in terms of their operating requirements. While a connected toaster, refrigerator or toothbrush might make for a great concepts video, it’s not exactly difficult from a connectivity perspective—just leverage the existing wireless network that already exist in a home and from there jump onto the public internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ExtraHop integrates into VMware’s cloud management platform

While it would be easy reading the headlines to assume that every organization under the sun is fully committed to the public cloud, the fact of the matter is that public cloud adoption—albeit massive and growing fast—is still the tip of the IT iceberg. For every few million dollars spent on public cloud infrastructure, there are hundreds and hundreds of millions spent on more traditional ways of delivering IT.Which is where a company such as VMware comes in. VMware, which popularized the notion of virtualization—or creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical box—is often criticized (by me, as well) for being somewhat slow to innovate and really embrace the cloud world. But it's not quite so simple as that—VMware has thousands of customers, huge market share and great existing revenues. It needs to move at an appropriate speed for all of these different stakeholders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Digify for Gmail: Mission Impossible for your email attachments

File sharing and the control over the data within file sharing sits on a continuum. On one end are the consumer offerings that are incredibly easy to use and come with enough, but not too much, functionality. That is the world Box, Dropbox and Google started with. And while these vendors have been moving towards higher-level features, it's fair to say that their start was in the ease-of-use court. At the other end, we have the solutions that are enterprise-focused. These solutions tend towards big, heavy, monolithic structures and myriad levels of control. They're all about ticking the boxes for enterprise security departments, and while they're certainly robust, they're not exactly known for user-friendliness. Indeed, the so-called "Dropbox problem" where enterprises see high levels of nonmandated solution use, came about largely because enterprise solutions are often so awful to use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Digify for Gmail: Mission Impossible for your email attachments

File sharing and the control over the data within file sharing sits on a continuum. On one end are the consumer offerings that are incredibly easy to use and come with enough, but not too much, functionality. That is the world Box, Dropbox and Google started with. And while these vendors have been moving towards higher-level features, it's fair to say that their start was in the ease-of-use court. At the other end, we have the solutions that are enterprise-focused. These solutions tend towards big, heavy, monolithic structures and myriad levels of control. They're all about ticking the boxes for enterprise security departments, and while they're certainly robust, they're not exactly known for user-friendliness. Indeed, the so-called "Dropbox problem" where enterprises see high levels of nonmandated solution use, came about largely because enterprise solutions are often so awful to use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Shippable ships its newest thing: Industrial strength continuous deployment

Founded back in 2013, Shippable is one of the cool kids in the continuous deployment (CD) space. For those unaware, CD is a movement in which development teams deploy code frequently instead of in irregular and widely spaced occurrences. It is a movement popularized by organizations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter that deploy code many, many times a day.Shippable, therefore builds a platform to reduce friction and therefore allow software development teams to not only ship code fast, but far more frequently as well. DevOps, the movement that brought together the development and operations side of IT departments, aims to increase this velocity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How bad is enterprise software? Really, really bad. But it’s not quite that simple.

There is a bit of a standing joke in the technology industry that revolves around enterprise software, the software that the largest organizations in the world use to run their core processes. While these solutions are robust and secure, the joke tends to be it's at the expense of the users, who often complain about poor user experience, inflexibility and essentially having to change the way they work within the business to suit the software. While user-centric design might be a huge buzzword in management circles, for those poor users of enterprise software, it seems to be a foreign concept.+ Also on Network World: Where do mobile apps fit in the world of enterprise software? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How bad is enterprise software? Really, really bad. But it’s not quite that simple.

IDG Contributor Network: SimpliVity delivers use case-focused hyperconverged solutions

SimpliVity is a vendor in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. What that means in plain English is that SimpliVity offers a product that is both hardware and software. Essentially it's about specific software tailored to the infrastructure on what it sits. The hyperconverged space is a busy one with several vendors all trying to justify their existence and differentiate themselves from the commodity way the large webscale vendors think about their infrastructure. The continuum is very stark. On one end lies Google, Facebook, et al., which consider physical servers to be replaceable, generic items that they think little about, focusing instead on the software that sits on top of them. At the other end, lies vendors such as HP, VMware and SimpliVity, which articulate the extra value that comes from converging hardware with software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here