CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT
ThoughtSpot | May 11, 2022
ThoughtSpot, the Modern Analytics Cloud company, today announced the launch of three new editions: Team Edition, Pro Edition, and a special bundle for startups, nonprofits, and education institutions. These are the first offerings from the company specifically for small teams and individuals. As part of these editions, ThoughtSpot also announced a consumption-based pricing model, where customers pay only for what they use instead of wasting resources on shelfware licenses sold by traditional analytics providers.
Today, customers can get started with Team Edition for a flat fee of $95 per month for a single user-group with unlimited users. Pro Edition starts at $2500 per month for up to 5 user-groups with unlimited users. Pro Edition customers will only pay for what they consume, based on actual queries. Startups, nonprofits, and education institutions with less than 100 people and less than $10M in annual revenue can take advantage of a special flat fee offer for Pro Edition, with per query charges waived. For the most demanding enterprise deployments, ThoughtSpot Enterprise Edition provides maximum scale with unlimited users, unlimited data, unlimited user groups, and enterprise-grade support SLAs. Enterprise Edition customers will only pay for what they use based on actual queries.
The new editions were unveiled alongside a major expansion to the company’s platform capabilities at Beyond, ThoughtSpot’s annual customer conference. Combined with these new editions, the announcements significantly advance the company’s product-led growth strategy.
Creating a new vector for growth
Companies have long recognized the value of their data to improve their business on multiple fronts, as research from Harvard Business Review demonstrates, but the lack of true self service analytics kept most organizations from realizing these benefits. The Modern Analytics Cloud from ThoughtSpot is the first analytics platform specifically built to deliver this self-service experience with Live Analytics. With ThoughtSpot, data is truly democratized.
Historically, ThoughtSpot was packaged to enable large deployments across organizations. With the launch of these new editions, companies can move beyond dead dashboards and put the power of Live Analytics in the hands of any size team, including individuals. With an affordable pricing model that starts at just $95 per month, the new editions meet the budgetary realities of any business. Pricing is also based on consumption, meaning customers only pay for the value they create with ThoughtSpot instead of being locked into user-based pricing and shelfware.
Leveraging the company’s SaaS platform, the new editions can be used immediately because it instantly connects to customers’ cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, AWS, Azure, and more. Just as ThoughtSpot democratizes data for any kind of user, the new editions democratize the Modern Analytics Cloud for any kind of organization.
About ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is the Modern Analytics Cloud company. Our mission is to create a more fact-driven world with the easiest to use analytics platform. With ThoughtSpot, anyone can leverage natural language search and AI to find data insights and tap into the most cutting edge innovations the cloud data ecosystem has to offer. Companies can put the power of their modern data stack in the hands of every employee, extend the value of their data to partners and customers, and automate entire business processes. ThoughtSpot enables everyone within an organization to limitlessly engage with live data regardless of their cloud data platform, making it easy to achieve granular, actionable insights through Live Analytics. Customers can take advantage of ThoughtSpot’s web and mobile applications to improve decision making for every employee. With ThoughtSpot’s developer-friendly platform, ThoughtSpot Everywhere, customers can also bring the Modern Analytics Cloud to their products and services, engaging users and keep them coming back for more. Organizations like Walmart, BT, T-Mobile, Snowflake, HubSpot, Exxon, Daimler, Medtronic, Hulu, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, OpenTable, Workato, and Nationwide Building Society rely on ThoughtSpot to transform how their employees and customers take advantage of data.
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CLOUD SECURITY
Flexera | June 17, 2022
Flexera, the company that helps organizations maximize business value from their technology investments, today announced new product features and industry momentum for Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization.
Flexera’s flagship platform, Flexera One, is the first of its kind: an award-winning platform that delivers the power to mitigate risk, reduce costs, and maximize every technology investment. It offers technology value optimization (TVO) through IT visibility, IT asset management (ITAM), cloud cost optimization (CCO), and cloud migration and modernization. Flexera One enables enterprises to take control of their cloud journey with:
Definitive technology resource data. Flexera One offers comprehensive and normalized cost visibility into the data center, SaaS and cloud through unique discovery and the unmatched Technopedia catalog of IT product reference data.
Consumption intelligence. Flexera One provides savings on licensing costs by applying use rights and rightsizing investments. Internal Flexera customer research has found that customers save more than 30 percent with this approach.
Automated portfolio governance. Flexera One continually optimizes business agility through automated cost optimization and feeding compliance and cost data into other IT solutions via outbound and inbound APIs.
Hybrid IT optimization. Customers leverage Flexera One’s data for negotiations with major vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP.
Flexera One FinOps Innovation
Flexera continues to work with its customers and the broader FinOps community. Recent Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization innovations include:
Cloud spend anomaly detection: anomaly analysis and detection in cloud spend based on any dimension. Choose business dimensions across multiple cloud costs. Look within automatically calculated thresholds at an account level and identify which services are driving outliers.
Cloud spend forecasting: straight line, linear regression and moving average, configurable look back, projection options, and categorization by relevant dimensions.
Usage forecasting: project usage by region, account or business dimension to support commitment and capacity planning decisions.
Cross-platform cost ingestion: common bill ingestion of any cloud or other costs into the platform. Flexera supports Alibaba Cloud, Azure China, Oracle cloud and the ingestion of data from any other service or source, including labor and full-time equivalent (FTE) costs, on-prem licensing or any cost to provide a total cost of ownership (TCO) view.
Automation engine for unit economics: production of unit economics KPIs using Flexera’s automation engine to ingest other metrics, such as usage data from other sources, to produce relevant cost of goods sold (COGS) measures. These include FinOps best-practice KPIs (such as cost per instance hour) and other business KPIs.
Contextualized multi-cloud data: complement existing hybrid and multi-cloud tagging strategies by ingesting attributes from CMDBs, enterprise architecture tools or other repositories.
Integration with existing tools: push cloud spend recommendations into existing tools, such as JIRA and ServiceNow, using Flexera’s automation engine. Engineers can use these existing tools to prioritize optimization initiatives.
Currency adjustment program: automatic conversion of cloud costs to any currency through integration with Xe.com. This makes multi-cloud strategies more effective for global enterprises that work across multiple currencies.
Growing Leadership in the FinOps Community
Beyond product innovation, Flexera’s commitment to the field of FinOps includes active involvement in initiatives that help advance cloud financial management.
Flexera’s Brian Adler, senior director, cloud market strategy, and Jeremy Chaplin, senior cloud solution architect, will speak at FinOps X in Austin, TX. The session, FinOps & IT Asset Management, The Partnership for Success, will be on Monday, June 20, from 4:10 to 4:40 pm CDT. The FinOps Foundation hosts the FinOps X event as the gathering place for engineers, FinOps practitioners, finance people, architects, and anyone who participates in managing the value of cloud.
About Flexera
Flexera delivers SaaS-based IT management solutions that enable enterprises to accelerate digital transformation and multiply the value of their technology investments. We help organizations inform their IT with definitive visibility into complex hybrid IT ecosystems, providing unparalleled IT insights that allow them to seize technology opportunities. And we help them transform their IT with tools that deliver actionable intelligence across an ever-increasing range of dimensions to effectively manage, govern and optimize their hybrid IT estate. More than 50,000 customers subscribe to our technology value optimization solutions, delivered by 1,300+ passionate team members worldwide.
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CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT
Aptum | June 18, 2022
Aptum, a hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider, has announced Part 2 of its annual Cloud Impact Report 2022, titled Solving the Data Security Equation. The report examines the complexities inherent in hybrid cloud environments and their implications on security, data governance, compliance and disaster recovery. In particular, it finds that while companies are convinced of the value of cloud computing, its drivers have evolved.
Drivers to the cloud
When it comes to the value of cloud, the majority of respondents (91%) consider cloud computing to be essential for data management. In fact, more than half (54%) believe cloud transformation has had a positive impact on data governance.
While financial considerations have traditionally been a common driver, the study shows a shift in focus for many organizations, especially as security concerns evolve and continue to be top-of-mind:
50% of respondents cited efficiency as the top motivator for cloud investments
Increased security is the second most important business driver for organizations investing in cloud computing, with 48% of respondents citing it as a key factor in their investment
Resilience is also a primary driver of cloud computing investments for 40% of companies
Managing complexity
During the pandemic, organizations had to hastily increase their cloud deployments to support the increase in remote work, enhance business resilience and enable greater flexibility. As a result, many businesses naturally moved toward a hybrid model. In fact, 86% of respondents said their organization has adopted a hybrid or multi cloud approach to cloud deployments.
For many organizations, the move to hybrid has meant their environments have become increasingly complex as data and workloads are now located across a range of cloud and non-cloud infrastructures.
As a result, many are grappling with complexities traditionally associated with hybrid cloud environments, such as data and workloads being located across a range of cloud and non-cloud infrastructures. Of those respondents, the top challenges cited in managing their environments include control and governance of access to cloud environments (90%); a clear mechanism to detect and respond to security threats across all environments (90%); and the ability to efficiently meet requirements of compliance audits (90%).
Impacts on security
The study showed that managing security effectively is no longer just an issue of securing data within each environment; data must also be secured as it moves between locations.
“Businesses use different environments for different purposes. A platform for application development and another as a production site, for example. That’s where you achieve the benefits of a hybrid cloud environment,” explains Marvin Sharp, Vice President of Product and Strategy at Aptum. “But moving workloads between the two environments puts data at risk. Therefore, in a hybrid work environment, organizations need to consider securing point A and point B, as well as the movement of data between them.”
When it comes to disaster recovery, the study’s results tell a similar story of complexity. Disaster recovery is amongst the top reasons organizations are continuing to move data to the cloud, with 37% of respondents citing improved data backup services and disaster recovery as a driver. However, 87% of respondents cite the ability to provide Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the business as a key consideration.
“Disaster recovery is traditionally thought of as being in one environment – usually very secure public or private cloud facilities,” says Sharp. “Various experiences of downtime during the pandemic confirmed the importance of a coherent disaster recovery strategy. But as hybrid environments become more widespread, disaster recovery becomes more complex, and it’s likely to become more dispersed as a result.”
Strategy is key to cloud transformation
The study’s results reveal that only 20% of organizations surveyed have a holistic cloud strategy in place. The other 80% have a fragmented approach to cloud transformation that lacks the necessary big-picture thinking. The results also reaffirm a singular holistic cloud strategy must have security principles embedded in its design at the earliest stage possible. By doing so, businesses can take an integrated approach to security, mitigate threats and minimize risks across their entire infrastructure stack. This will eliminate any disconnect between the cloud's promise of secure, reliable operations and what organizations will actually experience.
The study canvassed the opinions and approach to cloud technology of 400 senior IT professionals. Respondents were from organizations with 250+ employees in the U.S., Canada and UK. Industries included financial services, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public education and the commercial sector.
About Aptum
Aptum is a hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider delivering complex and high-performance cloud solutions with an integrated secure network. Using its Data As Infrastructure™ approach, Aptum solves complex technology challenges with total solutions and tailored options that drive tangible business outcomes and maximize the value of its clients’ technology investments. Aptum’s cloud and global network solutions, underpinned with expert managed and professional services, offer genuine choice and adaptability with international reach spanning North America, Latin America, Europe and the United Kingdom. Aptum is a portfolio company of DigitalBridge, a global investment firm dedicated to strategic opportunities in digital infrastructure.
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CLOUD SECURITY
BeBop Technology | July 06, 2022
As the media and entertainment industry reaches all-time highs with content production, the demand for post-production artists has never been greater. BeBop Technology, creator of a powerful, agile, and reliable platform for remote virtual post-production, is collaborating with Google Cloud to enable editors, visual effects artists, animators, and producers to create and collaborate virtually and remotely.
"Helping media and entertainment customers meet and exceed their production requirements with cloud-based solutions is a key focus of Google Cloud and our partners," said Kip Schauer, Global Head of Media and Entertainment Partnerships. "With BeBop's solutions available on Google Cloud's global and flexible infrastructure, customers will have access to the solutions and technologies they need to seamlessly collaborate with their teams and deliver creative content from wherever they work."
The BeBop OS provides post-production artists with seamless access to powerful, secure GPU desktops to run their favorite creative tools virtually and remotely from any computer with an internet connection. BeBop's rich collaboration features, high speed file transfer, and content management tools enable artists to work together from anywhere and remotely collaborate with multiple creatives on projects.
"The BeBop OS deployed on Google Cloud has proven to support not only large media and entertainment customers, but any customer in the content creation business, Virtual and remote media workflows and content creation best practices are BeBop's foundation, which is why we are so vital to enabling entire post-production pipelines for TV series, specials, and virtually every major streaming group on the planet."
David Benson, BeBop Technology President and Chief Product Officer
Key features of the BeBop OS on Google Cloud:
Deploy Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Foundry's Nuke, Autodesk's Maya, Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve, and many more, directly in Google Cloud
Stream editorial or graphics sessions for review and approval in real-time or on demand in a browser, with low latency, annotated notes, and audio conferencing
Move files from on premises to the cloud and back again superfast and manage content with ease and speed
Create shareable links to send or receive content files or stream sessions to collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world
Access shared high performance storage and/or BeBop Flex storage powered by LucidLink
Leverage powerful enterprise features like Single Sign On (SSO) and customization options for virtualized software configurations, workflows or support
About BeBop Technology
Los Angeles-based BeBop Technology has sat at the intersection of art and technology since its founding in 2015. It is the creator of the world's most powerful, agile, and reliable platform for remote virtual post-production, the BeBop OS.
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