Unisys has announced it has joined Google’s Cloud Partner Advantage programme.

By providing Google’s complete suite of Cloud and Infrastructure services and Digital Workplace Services, Unisys says it can offer clients more options for optimising their digital workplace environments through its’ end-to-end cloud management services.

In addition to joining the programme, Unisys will sell Google Cloud and Google Workspace solutions as part of its offering.

“This partnership announcement with Google is significant because it allows Unisys to expand our existing cloud-agnostic approach in Asia Pacific,” says Brad Bowden, director cloud & infrastructure, Unisys Asia Pacific,

“Strong vendor relationships are key to Unisys being able offer the best solutions to the client business transformation challenge,” he says.

“The success of our go-to-market strategy is directly related to the investment to partner with market leaders like Google.”

According to the company, joining the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program expands Unisys’ ability to deliver outcome-based, end-to-end cloud services to its clients via a complete array of cloud advisory, digital transformation, application modernisation, migration, security, compliance automation, orchestration and comprehensive managed services capabilities.

Further, as a Google Workspace reseller, Unisys will assist its clients using Google Cloud to optimise their workplace environment through its extensive field services, service desk, endpoint management, productivity and collaboration offerings.

In February, Unisys was named as a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP) for the third year in a row.

To pass the certification, Unisys had to demonstrate that it had worked successfully with its Azure clients on its Cloud Management Platform (CMP), which is powered by its CloudForte technologies.

Unisys vice president cloud and infrastructure, Mike Morrison, said at the time, “By again passing the Azure Expert MSP criteria, Unisys has proven that it can consistently and securely design, implement and manage Azure services.

“Our success with the clients for whom we are currently using AI-led automation, migrations, optimisation and security to realise the benefits of their cloud transformation is even more concrete proof.”

That same month Unisys joined the Lenovo partner ecosystem.

Unisys says its support of Lenovo’s solutions will be backed by its Digital Workplace Services, including pre-deployment, deployment, maintenance and lifecycle management supply chain services.

Lenovo president of commerical IoT group John Gordon said at the time: “Our ThinkIoT Solutions are helping to accelerate business transformation for the long-term.

Cloud adoption is now a key framework for the technology that upholds our everyday life, and has evolved into an essential feature for all businesses.

Within the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw a clear focus on crisis management – with organisations desperate to build on their cloud usage and adopt new tech to ensure business continuity. Now, cloud technology is vital to a company’s digital transformation. With the situation in our world continuing for the foreseeable future, businesses are being pushed to guarantee their digital transformation to not only be dependable but competitive.

As a huge part of society responded to the pandemic and made the decision to enter into some sort of lockdown, companies and businesses of every kind were affected. We witnessed a mass employment shift from being centralised in offices to working remotely from home, and the cloud sphere became depended upon in ways we have never seen before. Not only did businesses have to ensure access to files to be able to continue to work from a new work environment, they also had to ensure their cloud-based services were entirely stable and secure. Since then, the world has moved on to the next phase, which involves a focus on leveraging the right tech, increasing business advocacy and gathering insights to move towards a more all-pervasive model of business.

Whether you’re 90% through completion or just getting started on your digital transformation journey, businesses must approach their change in three key areas.

The first should be at the heart of all businesses’ efforts; transforming the customer experience. People, and more specifically customers, are the reason you exist and continue to flourish. Their comfort, happiness and ability to access a great end product – whether it’s migrating small workloads to cloud or a complete rehaul towards enterprise-wide virtual desktop infrastructure. People need to be central to your business model and first on your list when considering a digital transformation.

A successful example of this was our work with a large telecommunications network provider in the USA. The company wanted to store and access their documents and digital assets in a structured manner, with access from anywhere in order to drive omni-channel content management and accelerate experience delivery. To help them achieve these objectives, we proposed a Digital Contract Automation & Storage (DCAS) solution – a cloud-based integrated solution for e-signature and digital storage that provides enhanced associate and agent experience at various corporate and retail stores. These solutions provided secure storage, collaboration, upload and management of all documents digitally – which lead to a much-enhanced customer experience.

The second area to focus on is systems and processes. Nearly all business models need updating to adapt with an everchanging world. This is particularly true in 2020 and will be for the years to come, as we can be sure that this pandemic will change the workings of the world forever. We can see just how important this step is, with the example of a US-based steel distribution company. They had legacy systems that resulted in a significant amount of manual operations and lack of end-to-end visibility of data – which hindered their growth and speed-to-market. Wipro helped the organization remove bottlenecks in key business processes and recommended a robust solution for current and future needs. This led to an updated and streamlined processes, which improved financial analytics and profitability analysis.

Finally, digital transformations don’t exist without technology. The introduction of new devices, machines, servers and cloud services, as well as updating the old, existing units and model, is essential to keep business fresh and competitive. This has been shown with our work with a global packaged food company which creates plant-based products through over 100 different brands. This UK-based food company embarked on an all-new IT infrastructure and applications landscape in place of the legacy inherited from the parent company. Wipro worked with the client to implement the entire infrastructure (excluding network), supply chain applications and processes. This focus on upgrading and refreshing the system allowed the company to have access to a future-proof platform with world-class processes and technology to support the business.

Within that entire overview of how to focus your digital transformation efforts, cloud adoption is undoubtably a crucial, underlying part that will transform business for the better – or worse if not executed, implemented or upheld correctly. Either way it is now more important than ever to any businesses’ future.

Like so many other innovators across the globe, forward-thinking organisations in the Asia-Pacific region are reinventing themselves with a goal to fuel renewed digital business growth. As economic activities return to pre-COVID pandemic levels, these savvy leaders are building technology-enabled business models.

Cloud computing has emerged as the core foundation of this renewed business technology focus, leading to Asia-Pacific public cloud services spending growth of over 38 percent to $36.4 billion in 2020, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

“Cloud services have addressed more than cost management challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cloud services and technologies have been the basis for the rapid introduction of new digital services to support remote workers and online customers, and it’s been the speed of implementation and low up-front costs that have enabled that,” said Chris Morris, vice president at IDC.

Cloud computing market development
Cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has been the top contributor to the overall public cloud spend during 2020, making up around 48 percent of the overall cloud investment — and it is expected to remain the highest throughout the forecast period of 2021-2024.

IaaS spending across compute, storage, and networking will remain steady throughout the forecast with compute taking the major share of spending followed by storage. Software as a Service (SaaS) is positioned as the second largest in terms of spending on cloud computing with a share of around 40 percent, followed by Platform as a service (PaaS) with an 11 percent share in 2020. The majority share of SaaS spending is coming from enterprises spending on cloud-hosted applications. Software Applications and System Infrastructure Software (SIS) is also contributing to SaaS spending.

This is expected to further grow as enterprises leverage SaaS solutions that cover collaboration, productivity, and IT security to support ‘remote working’ and the ‘hybrid workforce’ phenomena. PaaS spending will be led by Data Management Software, which will record a five-year CAGR of 41.2 percent during 2019-2024.

IDC expects this trend to continue due to the focus on business scalability, increased performance, improved security, and optimising IT operations to create business resiliency and cap on-premises infrastructure costs. Moreover, cloud-based security benefits are driving enterprises in the region to migrate to public cloud service offerings with new enthusiasm.

Regarding industry growth projections, Professional Services (15 percent share), Banking and Discrete Manufacturing (around 10 percent share) are the top three industries accounting for one-third of the overall public cloud services spending throughout the forecast period of 2021-24.

However, Construction and Professional Services — due to increased focus on external-facing interactions and customer experience — will see the fastest growth in public cloud spending with a five-year CAGR of 39 percent and 35 percent respectively. Regarding commercial segment growth, very large businesses will account for 37.1 percent, medium-sized businesses will deliver around 30.2 percent, and large businesses with 20.8 percent are the three segments that accounted for the Asia-Pacific total 2020 public cloud spending.

Both small and medium-size businesses show the fastest growth during the forecast period of around 34 percent in cloud investment. These segments were the hardest hit organisations during the global pandemic, and have an immediate need for business continuity, resiliency, and eventually new digital growth.

Outlook for public cloud services adoption
From a geographical perspective, China was the largest market for public cloud services in 2020 with its $19.4 billion investment that accounted for about 53.4 percent of the Asia-Pacific total. The openness of enterprises to adopt cloud technology, supplemented by government initiatives and the presence of home-grown cloud service providers, is boosting the continued adoption and growth.

Australia ($5.2 billion) and India ($3.5 billion) will be in second and third place respectively in terms of cloud infrastructure and service spending in the region, driven by fast adoption across enterprises and the presence of global hyperscale public cloud providers.

That said, I anticipate that cloud computing trends in this region will be reflected in other regions as a post-pandemic economic recovery emerges, and the thriving organisations accelerate their digital transformation agenda. Therefore, forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs will have a unique opportunity to further influence digital business growth strategies.

The global lockdown has made cloud technology imperative for business continuity. Of all the disruptive technologies, cloud has the biggest impact because of its adaptability, accessibility, scalability, resilience and cost.

Recognising this, the government plans to lead the growth of the cloud industry by adopting a cloud-first strategy in the public sector and appointing cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) to build Malaysia’s capabilities in the segment.

While plans for cloud implementation have been in the works for several years, greater adoption of the technology is the focus of the Malaysia Digital Economy blueprint. The objective is to bring about a pivotal transition to achieve the country’s goal of becoming a regional leader in the digital economy.

This national objective offers a chance for a significant portion of local businesses, still relying on legacy technologies, to start investing in disruptive technologies, say experts.

There was a marked increase in the adoption of cloud services during the pandemic, spotlighting the critical need to strategically prepare for cloud adoption.

“With continued lockdowns and restricted movements around the world, many businesses have integrated cloud-based solutions to foster remote working environments, continue reaching their customers online and protect their data,” says Alvin Gan, head of technology consulting at KPMG Malaysia.

Under the blueprint in the MyDIGITAL initiative, four CSPs — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Telekom Malaysia — have been given conditional approval to build and manage hyperscale data centres and cloud services in Malaysia.

Additionally, the government has proposed the appointment of three local information and communications technology (ICT) companies as MSPs. The MSPs will work with the CSPs to manage cloud services for the public sector. The three MSPs are Enfrasys Solution Sdn Bhd, Prestariang Systems Sdn Bhd and Cloud Connect Sdn Bhd.

With the digital infrastructure in place, the government hopes to move 80% of its services to the cloud by 2022 and in turn incentivise the private sector, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to transition to the cloud.

As SMEs are the backbone of the local economy — comprising 98.5% of all business establishments in Malaysia — they should start investing in disruptive technologies such as big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing to avoid being left behind, says Geoff Soon, managing director, South Asia at Snowflake.

Although Malaysian SMEs are receptive to using digital technologies to enhance their business in general, they are still not availing themselves of digitalisation enablers such as cloud computing, IoT and data analytics, according to a white paper by SME Corp Malaysia and Huawei Technologies (M) Sdn Bhd.

The white paper, “Accelerating Malaysian Digital SMEs: Escaping the Computerisation Trap”, notes that while 44% of SMEs are using cloud computing, most of them have not adopted cloud software as a service (SaaS) to drive software process improvements. Instead, they are only using cloud storage services such as Dropbox to store personal documents, pictures and videos.

With the MyDIGITAL road map, SMEs will inevitably benefit from the many changes taking place with regard to cloud adoption, says Gan.

“The Covid-19 pandemic, in its own unique way, accelerated this change. From our observation, those that tend to be left behind are the ones that do not see the urgency to change and adapt.

“Many SMEs were toying with the idea of transforming digitally before the onset of the pandemic, but they decided not to pull the trigger. However, those that did (transform) were in an arguably better position to mitigate the challenges wrought by Covid-19,” he says.

Gan reasons that SMEs generally benefit from not having to deal with legacy issues, unlike established organisations, when embarking on digital transformation.

“In my work, it is often legacy systems that may not be fully equipped to be cloud-enabled. Even if it could be done, the cost is likely to balloon,” he adds.

But this transition need not require large investments, says K Raman, managing director of Microsoft Malaysia.

“Foundationally, there are cloud-based solutions available, such as Microsoft Azure with a pay-per-use model, as well as SaaS solutions like Microsoft 365 with a subscription model. These solutions require lower investment costs but deliver high impact.”

Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources, he points out.

“The first immediate benefit in having a holistic journey to the cloud is cost effectiveness. Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software. In addition to the cost savings, implementing a holistic cloud journey helps to eliminate data silos.

“It brings together enterprise-wide data to create a comprehensive single source of truth across the business. For organisations today, data is the new currency. It is the key building block towards becoming a data-driven organisation.”

Cloud adoption has also increased as concerns about data security have significantly subsided, as both the underlying technology and market understanding have matured over the years, says Soon.

In fact, many organisations are realising that public clouds can provide a higher level of security than on-premise infrastructure when organisations adopt best practices, he notes.

“In addition, major data storage challenges are taken care of by cloud providers. Cloud technology helps with business productivity, enables remote working and helps organisations save costs with a flexible consumption model without having to rely solely on physical data centres, physical infrastructure or storage models. It eliminates the need for businesses to purchase, develop and operate infrastructure and applications, which typically require significant upfront investments.

“By adopting and leveraging cloud services and capabilities, organisations acquire added flexibility and convenience. Cloud services are available on-demand, allowing organisations to connect and process data from multiple discrete sources seamlessly.

“Cloud services also allow organisations to scale up or down rapidly, with an elasticity that means that they can immediately provide or release data according to what is required. All these benefits contribute to Malaysia’s goal of building a digital and competitive economy,” says Soon.

If all goes as planned, the local data centre industry is expected to contribute RM3.6 billion to the country’s revenue by 2026, states the Malaysia Digital Economy blueprint.

“We believe that going to the cloud is key to unlocking further digital transformation, and it is a gradual process. I also want to highlight that SMEs do not necessarily have to make large investments to facilitate cloud-based digital transformation,” says Raman.

According to the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey 2020, 47% of the respondents noted that the pandemic had permanently accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of emergent technologies, with cloud technology ranked third.

“In short, many businesses are gravitating towards cloud technology because it allows for quick deployment. Many models available today, for example, SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), provide a plethora of options for organisations to get things running quickly and reduce cost in operations,” says Gan.

Nevertheless, although the blueprint is an indication that the government is serious about having cloud technology as one of the fundamentals driving the country’s transformation agenda, it is important to ensure that there is demand, he points out.

“The last thing we need is more investments in infrastructure and cloud technology without knowing if they will be fully utilised. One of the ways to manage this is to ensure the synchronisation of all public sector agencies across all levels as part of the cloud agenda,” adds Gan.

Soon concurs that to achieve the ambitious goal, local organisations will have to join forces to adapt to the next normal. “This means more widespread adoption and implementation of cloud services across the country, from end-to-end governmental services to an increasing adoption of e-commerce by the private sector.

“It is imperative that the government considers tactical strategies to ensure the success of the MyDIGITAL initiative. An important first step is to understand the benefits of modern data analytics and cloud deployment. From that point, the government can move away from legacy technology, revisit security policies and review best practices for cloud deployment,” he says.

Open source has permanently altered how we work and conduct business. Linux, and thousands of other open source projects and open standards, now dominate the software landscape, supporting emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and edge computing. Without open source, the DevOps tooling ecosystem would lack Docker, Kubernetes, service mesh, popular databases, and many CI/CD tools used by DevOps teams daily.

Now, more than ever, companies are searching for ways to meet escalating user demands. The pandemic has amplified this urgency, accelerating existing digital transformation initiatives. Arguably, open source is the engine that now powers the digital innovation required to compete. Leveraging open source could also help check rising cloud costs. With proprietary solutions falling out of favor, many enterprise leaders are adopting open source alternatives for infrastructure modernization and application development.

Red Hat recently released its third annual State of Enterprise Open Source report. The report surveyed 1,250 IT leaders worldwide on their open source adoption and usage patterns. The findings validate what most of us already know — open source is now fundamental to most technology stacks. Without it, most development projects would fall flat in an instant.

Open Source Use Cases
Open source is at the heart of modern software development. According to the report, 90% of enterprise IT leaders are using open source. So, where is open source being applied? Well, 64% of enterprises use open source software for IT infrastructure modernization. The report surmised that this could be due to Linux and open source infrastructure replacing proprietary systems.

The report also found 54% of enterprises use open source for application development. This is no surprise, as engineers routinely adopt open source libraries and packages to construct B2B and user-facing experiences. In a digital-only environment, applications are the lifeblood for many businesses, and open source is critical scaffolding.

The third top use case for enterprise open source is digital transformation, at 53%. This figure has increased by 11 percentage points in the last two years alone. Open source will likely continue to replace non-digital or manual processes with software-based, automated processes.

In the enterprise, open source is used in networking, adopted by 54% of enterprises, databases, at 53% and security, at 52%. Other areas mentioned in the report include big data analytics and cloud management tools.

In recent years, multi-cloud has become a notable trend. The idea is that organizations will seek out multiple cloud vendors to support different use cases. The Red Hat report confirmed that hypothesis, finding that 69% of respondents prefer to use multiple vendors for their cloud. As hybrid, multi-cloud setups profligate, cloud expertise and smart multi-cloud economic practices continue to gain importance.

Containers and K8s
Open source components are the foundation for containers and container management utilities. As reliance on containers grows, so will the dependence on open source technology. The report found just under half of enterprises now use containers in production. An additional 37% also use containers for development-only purposes.

To orchestrate these containers, IT teams have coalesced around Kubernetes. Sixty-six percent of respondents view Kubernetes as very or extremely important. As Kubernetes becomes ubiquitous, growth in container usage is slated to continue — about one in three respondents reported their container usage will increase significantly in the next 12 months.

“Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for Linux container development,” said Michael Hinterland, team lead, ICS cloud & automation and ICS system & middleware, Porsche Informatik.

While Kubernetes is flourishing, there are certainly variances across industries. For example, 62% of financial services and telecommunications respondents adopted containers in production, while other sectors, such as health care and retail, saw a lower adoption of containers in production, at 47% and 50%, respectively. The highly-regulated financial services sector also scored high on Database DevOps, a separate report recently concluded.

Open Source Benefits and Barriers
There are numerous benefits to using enterprise open source software. For one, a commitment to open source brings transparency and collaboration improvements. Respondents also cited higher quality software, access to the latest innovations and improved security as being among the top benefits to adopting open source software.

But open source has its drawbacks, too; 42% of tech leaders reported a lack of support as a top hurdle to enterprise open source adoption. This checks out – community-driven projects don’t typically offer traditional support systems. Without accessible frameworks for learning, creating a Center of Excellence at scale becomes difficult.

Other top barriers to enterprise open source adoption include compatibility, code security and a lack of internal skills. Introducing open source within an enterprise means upskilling the workforce and encouraging secure-by-default settings to avoid costly misconfigurations. It could also mean working with trusted allies that further open source initiatives, the report recommended.

Open Source Fuels Emerging Tech
“Open source has solidified itself as an innovation engine for the software industry,” wrote Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat.

Indeed, open source is at the heart of most cutting-edge emerging technologies. For example, 55% of respondents report using enterprise open source in edge computing and internet of things (IoT) settings. Simultaneously, 48% of respondents use open source for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Amid open source projects like OpenAI and GPT–3, AI is eating the software world, Forbes reported.

Both categories are slated to increase by nearly 20 percentage points in the next two years, whereas the use of proprietary solutions for AI/ML will decrease. Open source will continue to affect buying decisions, as 83% of IT leaders are more likely to choose a vendor that has contributed to the open source community.

Within a COVID-19-influenced world, “the problems are too big for one person, one company or one organization to solve,” said Cormier. “But it’s in moments like this where open source truly shows its power.”

Digital skills are becoming an essential component for employees to perform their jobs proficiently. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this digitisation journey to a certain extent for organisations as well as individuals.

India’s present workforce comprises only 12% digitally skilled employees, and the number of employees requiring digital skills in the country will need to increase nine-fold by 2026, according to a report commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The research surveyed over 500 digital workers in India, and 3,196 workers in total across six countries in the APAC region, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

Nearly 150 million workers in six APAC countries apply digital skills on the job, and those in need of such skills is poised to surge past 800 million by 2026, according to the report titled ‘Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches’.
About 70% of workers in India applied advanced digital skills in their jobs, it noted. And the top five digital skills in-demand in India are cloud architecture design (34%); software operations support (31%); website, game, or software development (28%); large-scale data modelling (28%); and cybersecurity skills (27%). Transitioning organisations from on-premises to cloud environments has been the most frequently used digital skill in India. This is reflected in the crucial role digitally-skilled employees play in transforming non-technology sectors like manufacturing.

Moreover, 76% of the digital workers in the country presently expect cloud computing to be an essential skill. Over 50% of digital workers in the manufacturing sector think they will require skills like cloud architecture design and the ability to create original digital content, to perform their jobs.

“A cloud-skilled workforce is instrumental in accelerating innovation and creating a competitive edge for India,” Rahul Sharma, President, AWS India and South Asia, said in a release.

In order to meet the projected demand of digitally skilled employees, the six APAC countries will need an estimated 5.7 billion digital skill sessions, and India will need a total of 3.9 billion digital skill sessions, over the next five years, as per the report..

“To meet the projected digital skill needs by 2026, each of the six APAC countries will require different policy approaches that address their unique challenges and skills priorities,” the report said.

Cloud security, also known as cloud computing security, is a collection of security measures designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and data. These measures ensure authentication of users and devices, access control for data and resources, and protection of data privacy. They also support data regulatory compliance.

But as companies move more data and applications to the cloud, IT professionals remain concerned about security, governance, and compliance issues when their content is stored in the cloud. They worry that highly sensitive business information and intellectual property may be exposed through accidental leaks or due to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

A crucial component of cloud security is focused on protecting data and business content, such as customer orders, secret design documents, and financial records. Preventing leaks and data theft is critical for maintaining your customers’ trust, and for protecting the assets that contribute to your competitive advantage.

Maintaining a strong cloud security posture helps organizations achieve the now widely recognized benefits of cloud computing: lower upfront costs, reduced ongoing operational and administrative costs, ease of scaling, increased reliability and availability, and a whole new way of working.

To actually reap the rewards of these benefits, the journey to the cloud must be secured in such a way, that the proliferation of connected devices coupled with today’s vanishing perimeter and ever-changing threat landscape do not overly complicate an already complex environment for organizations to secure. This is where VMware come in.

VMware allows you to access any cloud while maintaining the highest level of consistency for infrastructure, operations and developer experience. With VMware, you have the freedom to build and deploy modern applications, from the data center to multiple cloud and edge environments. Migrate seamlessly between environments and ensure that all data and applications remain secure and protected in any cloud.

Vmware also allow you to match your applications to the unique strengths of any environment. With the most hybrid cloud options—delivered with key partners like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud—you can access the power of leading hyperscale clouds within proven VMware infrastructure.

One critical principle that VMware employ is that the measures shouldn’t be so rigid that users have to find workarounds to do their jobs. When security controls make a cloud computing solution difficult to use, users figure out ways of working around the controls, thereby rendering the system insecure. As experts point out, users are often the weakest link in any security system.

As organizations rapidly adopt cloud networks, due to flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness and more, security needs to be at the front and centre. It is against this background that the virtual Cloud & Security Forum 2020 is designed to assist in driving an impartial and informed dialogue in the rapidly evolving information security industry. The virtual event will unfold on the 18th and 19th of March.

Having continued to create an environment for making new connections, the summit with visionary speakers at the nexus of new technologies and cyber security solutions purposes to share their insights and demonstrate their ability to safeguard customer data.

From new applications being consistently added to networks to employees taking access control shortcuts and credentials being compromised, it is clear that there are endless vulnerabilities to detect and manage.

a global provider of digital transformation consulting and development services, has been selected by Forrester in its “Now Tech: Continuous Automation and Testing Services Providers, Q1 2021″ report.

Companies undergoing digital transformation are constantly met with the challenges of delivering business value while achieving higher quality, greater efficiency, and faster turnaround times. The Forrester report discusses the modern approach to application development and delivery and highlights the benefits of continuous automation and testing. According to Forrester, “to achieve quality at speed, adaptive delivery teams must improve and scale their software testing capabilities by testing early, often, automatically, and continuously.”

Grid Dynamics has been a strong proponent of continuous automation and testing and has built a strong portfolio of solutions to address the needs of modern enterprises that includes DevOps 2.0, DataOps, MLOps, lightweight continuous delivery, data quality, test data management, continuous testing in production, chaos engineering, and AI-powered testing. When combined with microservices architecture and cloud platforms, these solutions lead to a 10x increase in speed to market, while reducing defects and infrastructure costs.

Max Martynov, Chief Technology Officer at Grid Dynamics, explained: “Companies that take a traditional approach to test and release automation are often left disappointed at the outcome. Flaky tests, long CI pipelines, and high cost of test environments cripple speed to market and lead to bloated infrastructure costs. We have successfully applied our digital-native engineering culture, cutting edge technologies, and proven solutions to redesign the processes, accelerate speed to market and power digital transformation.”

Grid Dynamics
Grid Dynamics (Nasdaq: GDYN) is a digital-native technology services provider that accelerates growth and bolsters competitive advantage for Fortune 1000 companies. Grid Dynamics provides digital transformation consulting and implementation services in omnichannel customer experience, big data analytics, search, artificial intelligence, cloud migration, and application modernization. Grid Dynamics achieves high speed-to-market, quality, and efficiency by using technology accelerators, an agile delivery culture, and its pool of global engineering talent. Founded in 2006, Grid Dynamics is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices across the US, Western, Central, and Eastern Europe

Organizations are rapidly implementing sophisticated technologies as they are shifting to the digital. This typically begins with building a transformative vision pertaining to how an organization will look like in the digital world. Transitioning to a digital ecosystem requires considerable undertakings and a skilled digital transformation team that will define an organization’s digital structure and processes to facilitate the germane changes within the company.

Here is the list of top 10 IT roles that will define a successful digital transformation.

Data Architect
A data architect plays a key role in today’s big data world. It is the architect behind data architecture, creating blueprints for data management systems. Data architects design a plan to integrate, centralize, protect and maintain data. As industries are increasingly going through a massive digital transformation, the role of data architects has become crucial. They allow businesses to access critical information in the right place, at the right time.

Cloud Specialists
Cloud specialists are responsible for maintaining the cloud-related issues within an organization. They implement and maintain server and network infrastructures. As a cloud specialist deals with a company’s information and services to be migrated to the cloud, their role is critical for continued operation in a digital landscape. Migrating a business application to cloud infrastructures are a significant step towards digital transformation, cloud specialists help companies to make faster and successful cloud migration.

Digital Product Managers
The success of a product team lies in the ability of a digital product manager. They oversee the entire life cycle of a product. A digital product manager is also responsible for storytelling, crafting product narratives, while owning the entire product from top to bottom to ensure effective user experience (UX).

Financial Analyst
Financial analysts make business recommendations for an organization based on analyses they carry out on factors like market trends. They articulate the financial value of digital transformation strategies, create a business case and present an accountability matrix. They are primarily responsible for creating financial models that can envisage the outcome of business decisions. Financial analysts work with all members and other finance professionals to ensure that the team looks at transformation activities from a financial standpoint.

Solution Architect
A solutions architect is an expert and one of the most imperative and client-facing roles in the IT industry. They are the technology leaders that design the IT architecture of a software system. As digital transformation demands specific expertise and a set of practices to align business focus with technology solutions, solution architects perform a crucial role in explaining how the adoption of these practices can help solve business problems.

Data Analysts
Data analysts hold a vital role in the digital transformation journey as they retrieve, gather and assess data. They enable organizations to take a data-driven approach to the decision-making process. Data analysts explore the way how data can be used to answer questions and solve problems businesses face while making the digital leap. With the development of computers and an ever-increasing move toward technological intertwinement, data analysis has evolved greatly.

Chief Digital Officer
A chief digital officer (CDO) focuses on creating new business opportunities, revenue streams and customer services by using digital technologies. The role of a CDO can be found operating under different titles such as digital strategist, digital marketing officer, and digital general manager. CDOs are typically responsible for helping the enterprise to develop and execute a cohesive digital strategy.

UX Designers
As the user experience is vital for a company’s product success, a UX designer plays a crucial role in the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product. UX designers work as part of a wider product team and help bridge the gap between the user, the development team, and key business stakeholders. They generally advocate for the end-user. They should understand the customer journey and develop an optimized experience. They also make sure that IT solutions have a user-centric design.

Database Administrator
Database administrators specialize in storing and organizing data. They comprise everything required to manage a database and make it available as needed. They install and upgrade the database server and application tools. As a database administrator requires knowledge of database queries, database theory, database design and more, they ensure compliance with database vendor license agreement, including a number of installations, while taking care of licensing renewals.

Systems Integrators
The role of a systems integrator is to link component subsystems and ensure they work together as a unit. Systems integrators design, develop, synthesize and implement technological applications that are customized to meet an organization’s needs. Their role can be found in diverse fields, but generally used in information technology such as computer networking, the defense industry, the mass media, enterprise application integration, business process management, or manual computer programming.

Google Cloud announced a multi-year agreement with Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, to migrate its SAP S/4HANA environment to the cloud, modernizing its IT infrastructure and increasing overall operational efficiency. This partnership is a critical step to Tapestry’s broader acceleration program and furthers the company’s goal to drive growth and enhance profitability across its portfolio.

While Tapestry’s three brands operate and maintain a unique brand identity and culture, the company serves as an enabling platform that enhances opportunities for each of the three brands, working to gain benefits and efficiencies across each where appropriate. With support from Google Cloud Partner Lumen, Google Cloud and Tapestry collaborated to migrate Tapestry’s SAP software environment onto Google Cloud. Accomplishing this during a global pandemic meant adapting to rapidly shifting work environments, but the team completed the task in just three-and-a-half months, ensuring the organization was up-and-running ahead of the holiday shopping season.

“Google Cloud has been a great partner, providing the power and elasticity for SAP S/4 HANA that our organization needed in order to achieve our goals of leveraging data and leading with a digital-first mindset,” said Ashish Parmar, Chief Information Officer at Tapestry. “Google Cloud has been an accelerator for our new digital capabilities, and our migration – even during the restrictions of a global pandemic – highlighted the successful collaboration and teamwork amongst the organizations.”

With its SAP S/4HANA suite now on Google Cloud, Tapestry is able to increase operational efficiency, allow for flexibility within the platform, and enable future innovation. As Tapestry continues to accelerate its digital transformation, it has access to Google Cloud’s full spectrum of solutions, including Google Cloud’s Network Intelligence Center. Working to ensure uptime and consistent performance of systems is key for any retailer, especially during peak shopping events when the spikes in demand can be extraordinary. With Network Intelligence Center, Tapestry can now quickly resolve any connectivity issues, cut down troubleshooting time, and ultimately improve the online shopper experience.

As we conclude one of the most turbulent years in retail history, retail leaders across the industry are prioritizing and heavily investing in their IT systems to accelerate their digital transformations, unlocking growth and performance improvement opportunities, while quickly bringing new experiences to life,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “By partnering with Google Cloud and Lumen, Tapestry now has the foundation to quickly understand the performance across each of its global brands through real-time insights—and take action to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. We’re excited to partner with iconic brands like those at Tapestry and help further their digital transformational journeys.”

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Google Cloud today announced a multi-year agreement with Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, to migrate its SAP S/4HANA® environment to the cloud, modernizing its IT infrastructure and increasing overall operational efficiency. This partnership is a critical step to Tapestry’s broader acceleration program and furthers the company’s goal to drive growth and enhance profitability across its portfolio.

While Tapestry’s three brands operate and maintain a unique brand identity and culture, the company serves as an enabling platform that enhances opportunities for each of the three brands, working to gain benefits and efficiencies across each where appropriate. With support from Google Cloud Partner Lumen, Google Cloud and Tapestry collaborated to migrate Tapestry’s SAP® software environment onto Google Cloud. Accomplishing this during a global pandemic meant adapting to rapidly shifting work environments, but the team completed the task in just three-and-a-half months, ensuring the organization was up-and-running ahead of the holiday shopping season.

“Google Cloud has been a great partner, providing the power and elasticity for SAP S/4 HANA that our organization needed in order to achieve our goals of leveraging data and leading with a digital-first mindset,” said Ashish Parmar, Chief Information Officer at Tapestry. “Google Cloud has been an accelerator for our new digital capabilities, and our migration – even during the restrictions of a global pandemic – highlighted the successful collaboration and teamwork amongst the organizations.”

With its SAP S/4HANA suite now on Google Cloud, Tapestry is able to increase operational efficiency, allow for flexibility within the platform, and enable future innovation. As Tapestry continues to accelerate its digital transformation, it has access to Google Cloud’s full spectrum of solutions, including Google Cloud’s Network Intelligence Center. Working to ensure uptime and consistent performance of systems is key for any retailer, especially during peak shopping events when the spikes in demand can be extraordinary. With Network Intelligence Center, Tapestry can now quickly resolve any connectivity issues, cut down troubleshooting time, and ultimately improve the online shopper experience.

“As we conclude one of the most turbulent years in retail history, retail leaders across the industry are prioritizing and heavily investing in their IT systems to accelerate their digital transformations, unlocking growth and performance improvement opportunities, while quickly bringing new experiences to life,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “By partnering with Google Cloud and Lumen, Tapestry now has the foundation to quickly understand the performance across each of its global brands through real-time insights—and take action to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. We’re excited to partner with iconic brands like those at Tapestry and help further their digital transformational journeys.”

Google Cloud

Google Cloud provides organizations with leading infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions. We deliver enterprise-grade cloud solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology to help companies operate more efficiently and adapt to changing needs, giving customers a foundation for the future. Customers in more than 150 countries turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to solve their most critical business problems.

Tapestry, Inc.

Tapestry, Inc. is a New York-based house of modern luxury lifestyle brands. The Company’s portfolio includes Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman. Our Company and our brands are founded upon a creative and consumer-led view of luxury that stands for inclusivity and approachability. Each of our brands are unique and independent, while sharing a commitment to innovation and authenticity defined by distinctive products and differentiated customer experiences across channels and geographies

Any statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in Google, Tapestry, Inc. and SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC), including each company’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K or 20-F, as applicable, and other filings with the SEC that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Google, Tapestry and SAP caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements which each company has no obligation to update and which speak only as of their dates.

Digital.ai, the creator of the industry’s first intelligent Value Stream Platform, today announced that it has been granted four U.S. patents for advances in AI-powered analytics. The patents represent industry-leading innovations in applying artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation techniques to address key challenges business and IT leaders face in driving higher levels of performance within their organizations. These four new patents bring the company’s total to more than 45 patents granted and further establish Digital.ai as the innovation leader in value stream management for the Global 5000.

Digital.ai’s four new patents pertain to the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to predict change and service disruption risk, in addition to automation innovations embedded in Digital.ai’s Value Stream Platform. According to Gartner’s recent Market Guide of DevOps Value Stream Management Platforms (VSMPs), “predictive analytics will be a key capability offered by DevOps VSMPs,” as “organizations are increasingly embracing the value of analytics to ensure successful deployments and demonstrate reduced production defects.”

“These new patents strengthen the AI-powered engine that serves as the foundation of the Digital.ai Value Stream Platform and give our customers peace of mind regarding the reliability of their application infrastructure,” said Gaurav Rewari, CTO and GM of VSM at Digital.ai. “Given today’s volatility, many enterprises have either slowed down or paused updates to their applications. However, their customers are relying on them to innovate more now than ever before. The capabilities represented by these patents enable IT organizations to continue to rapidly drive value for their customers while mitigating risk to the business.”

Digital.ai’s newest patents include:

Automated Health Assessment and Outage Prediction System (US Patent No. 10,613,525 ) Enables IT departments to increase change velocity while minimizing business service interruptions. The patented techniques use IT service management (ITSM) data in conjunction with application performance management (APM) and machine data to score changes, monitor the impact of changes post execution, and evaluate the health of a configuration item (CI). The technology is part of Digital.ai’s Change Risk Prediction and Major Incident Prediction solutions.

Warehouse-Based Reporting and Operational Reporting Integration (US Patent No. 10,614,091 ) Enables the unification of operational and warehouse reporting for analysis of real time content side by side with historical content, and turns data discrepancies between real-time and historical content into useful information for trend identification and proactive alerting.

Input Gathering System and Method for Defining, Refining, or Validating Star Schema for a Source Database (US Patent No. 10,599,678 ) Enables programmatic analysis of documentation, operational reporting setups, and query logs in conjunction with data profiling for identifying the inputs needed for creating and updating star schemas that are required for warehouse-based reporting. These automated techniques minimize the need for domain experts and enable Digital.ai’s analytic solutions to leverage a large number of data sources that are part of typical value stream chains in a cost-effective manner.

Model-Driven Reporting (US Patent No. 10,713,609 ) Enables programmatic generation of reports for multiple business intelligence (BI) tools using a declarative BI tool agnostic model for reporting which also enables lineage and change impact analysis all the way from data sources to the reporting layer.

The addition of these patents brings Digital.ai’s total to over 45 patents granted with several additional patents pending. The patented technologies are the foundation of Digital.ai’s Value Stream Platform and reflect the company’s expertise across agile, security, DevOps, AIOps and advanced analytics. The Digital.ai intelligent Value Stream Platform provides a unified value stream solution, including enterprise agile planning with continuous delivery and release orchestration, continuous testing and application security, that enables organizations to align software development value streams to strategic business outcomes.

Digital.ai

Digital.ai is an industry-leading technology company dedicated to helping Global 5000 enterprises achieve digital transformation goals. Using value stream management as its cornerstone, Digital.ai combines innovative technologies in agile planning, application protection, software testing and delivery, and artificial intelligence into a unified Value Stream Platform. Digital.ai makes it possible to connect software development and delivery efforts to strategic business outcomes and create secure digital experiences customers trust

Gartner Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Management Platforms, by Hassan Ennaciri, Manjunath Bhat, Daniel Betts, Chris Saunderson, Joachim Herschmann, and Thomas Murphy- 29-Sept-2020.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All right reserved.

Indosat Ooredoo has selected Ericsson Digital Monetization Platform (DMP) transforming its business support systems (BSS) with Ericsson Digital BSS to deliver a fully digitized customer experience.

In this partnership, Ericsson’s Digital Monetization Platform will support Indosat Ooredoo’s digital transformation journey and boost its competitive edge by delivering personalized product offerings to its customers and enabling monetization of 5G, IoT and digital services for both consumers and enterprises.

Ericsson’s Digital Monetization Platform provides comprehensive support for charging, billing, order management and catalog capabilities for a digital operator. Catalog Manager will enable Indosat Ooredoo Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business services with digitized product lifecycle management. Order Care will bring consistent omnichannel product experience for Indosat Ooredoo customers. Charging and billing will enable real time rating and monetization of dynamic and personalized plans.

The Digital Monetization Platform includes open APIs and enables a micro services architecture which support speedy integration of new channels and services. It will enable business agility through DevOps for new services design, orchestration and monetization.

In Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo and Ericsson have a long-standing technology and services partnership covering 2G, 3G, 4G and more recently, live 5G trials. As a global ICT leader, Ericsson’s solutions provide access to continuous technology upgrades and improvements for customers worldwide.

Progressive I&O organizations embrace infrastructure-led innovation, according to the keynote for this week’s virtual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020.

In this ever-changing, ever-evolving tech world, the enterprise is constantly on the precipice of innovation, or, at the very least, adopting the latest developments. Both this year and into 2021, the most resilient in the enterprise will be helmed by infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders who make infrastructure-led innovation a top priority.

Today (Monday, Dec. 7) was the start of the virtual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020. Gartner analyst and vice president of advisory Christopher Mixter delivered the keynote address in which he focused on this “new way” of thinking, the hallmark of progressive I&O organizations.

Infrastructure-led innovation presents a strategy to stakeholders hamstrung by business challenges and important for those who want to expand the scope of their enterprise by employing operational practices that benefit customer experiences and solutions.

Effective I&O leaders aren’t waiting for any kind of new normal to make itself known; they are already innovating,” Mixter said in his address. “Prior to the crisis, enterprises only knew I&O through their help-desk experiences or the annual budget cycle. The pivot to remote work has created newfound visibility for I&O and enough positive sentiment from the broader organization to give I&O leaders the courage to launch a reinvention of their digital foundations.”

The keynote identified the four capabilities that make up infrastructure-led innovation: Cost intelligence, workforce transformation, platform ops, and marketing.

Cost intelligence: Mixter explained, “Cost intelligence is the ability to balance cost management with new investment and show the enterprise how to free up ‘capital’ in the form of time, creativity and cash to re-invest in I&O.” The most effective I&O organizations follow this discipline, because they need to protect financial interests, while defending funding for the needed digital acceleration. Mixter cited Gartner research that found that 65% of CEOs and 69% of boards of directors are eager to step up the pace in the adoption of new digital business.

Workforce transformation: While the workforce has undergone tremendous changes imposed by COVID-19, including a dramatic shift to working-from-home, new developments bring even more changes. IT departments reliant on building servers and ticking off checklists must adjust to the pursuit of skill in advanced analytics, automation, continuous delivery and cloud. All companies want meaningful and successful growth, and these new competencies will help through visibility and relevance. Mixter said, “To reinvest and redeploy the time and treasure harvested through cost intelligence, I&O teams will need to be staffed with people embodying a more expansive skill set than what infrastructure has historically called for; in the past two years, for instance, over 40% of heads of I&O have been hired from outside of the I&O team. Infrastructure-led innovation demands transformation of the entire workforce.”

Platform ops: Mixter said, “The newest I&O customer is the 41% of the non-IT workforce that now customizes and builds technology for work. Success hinges directly on how these new customers are served, and platform ops helps reach them.” Foundational to the enterprise will be the acknowledgement and execution of the need to shift from a product-centric approach to a digital foundations, customer-centric one. “Customer in, rather than technology-out” may seem counterintuitive, but it’s one of the most vital elements of platform ops. There’s a responsibility and independence to this method of management, and software delivery teams, inside and outside of IT, will develop and operate their own products.

Marketing: It’s mildly surprising that only 54% of organizations look beyond metrics and directly measure customer value. This is what businesses that embrace infrastructure-led innovation are doing: Seeing beyond metrics. “Reliability isn’t marketable because it’s simply table-stakes,” Mixter said. “Metrics such as customer effort or lead-time for change illustrate how I&O enables the business through greater speed and agility. The most effective I&O leaders are making marketing a design principle of the function.”

It’s no longer acceptable to purport to over-focus on exceeding expectations of reliability to impress your CIO. Gartner research revealed that I&O leaders “who over-perform on customer value metrics while merely meeting expectations on reliability are seven times more likely” to be successful.

“This year, I&O teams delivered the most significant IT transformation of our generation. In 2021, infrastructure-led innovation will enable I&O leaders to be known for the business innovation they provide as opposed to the infrastructure they manage,” Mixter concluded

The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020 provides analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure and operations trends.

The Coronavirus pandemic has catapulted digital transformation to the top of the must-haves in the minds of CIOs. It has been a go-to enabler for organizations to enhance their customer experience and generate higher ROI. Businesses with brick-and-mortar presence were shifting their approach towards building a digital presence to stay relevant and ahead of their competition. Many have already begun their digital transformation journey, while some are in the designing phase. Technology landscape is dynamic in nature. While the pandemic forced businesses to adopt digital drivers such as automation, big data, digital workforce, etc., they were soon replaced with the next big wave of digital transformation. This new wave has brought in new trends that will shape up the next normal. Let’s look at 5 new such trends that will soon become the next must-haves.

Customer Experience Reimagined
It’s not just about having the best products anymore. The new wave of millennials prefers convenience over loyalty. Create digital experiences that support modern web in the form of progressive web apps, true native mobile apps with best-in-class UX, intelligent chat-bots, conversational apps, wearables, and immersive experiences that leverage augmented reality. Organizations are trying to maximize the use of components and backend integration that leads to a unified and seamless experience across channels.

The next big thing in Customer experience (CX) is to design amazing applications for any audience across any device with no limits on user experience taking full advantage of the underlying device OS for native and full power of modern browsers for web. Omni-channel tools eliminate data siloes, and bring all the data in one place. Be it a web presence, a physical store visit, or a mobile application click, omni-channel binds all customer-facing interfaces together, integrated at the back-end, and helps in better CX and data visibility across the board.

Data and User Privacy
In the wake of privacy concerns amongst digital users, we will be seeing organizations focusing on user and data privacy. This will soon become a unique selling proposition for many to leapfrog their competitors. This could mean that users in the next normal will be able to allow/deny access to their data residing on applications, web and other digital channels. The user will be the owner of his/her data. Data privacy has shaken even multi-national brethren, forcing them to comply with new regulations laid by authorities. EU has already entered the game with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance policy and other regions have followed suit.

APIs – The Road to Cloud
Cloud is already adopted by most organizations to create a seamless business continuity and fasten go-to market. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are key in building economies of scale. From converting legacy infrastructure to micro-services, APIs will help businesses to reduce data silos and create collaborative experiences. It will also help them convert scattered applications into one behemoth of a data mart, helping them in making critical business-decisions and increase their overall ROI.

XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
As-a-Service (aaS) has already become the norm to become a truly digital-native enterprise. The new trend in the aaS model is Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) where services rendered and delivered will completely reside on the cloud with virtual access to almost everything. Tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in building those services or augmenting existing services to achieve the digital-native status quo.

AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service)
AI technologies are already used by 77% of consumers. A number of technological innovations such as data processing, and face & speech recognition have become possible due to AI. AI is a vast area that includes AI platforms, chat-bots, machine learning (algorithm category consisting of various libraries and frameworks), deep learning, and analytics.

AI has led to rise in the use of machine learning in computing. AI has contributed significantly in creating a framework for cloud computing. Many IT industry giants are already betting huge on AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence as a Service) with new line of services such as digital assistance, cognitive computing, machine learning, business intelligence, and so on.

These services can have a significant impact on the day-to-day lives of consumers. With the help of vital statistics from health-care organizations, AI can help identify patterns and predict the desired outcome of a given situation in a focused environment. AI can also help in tracking of smart devices, thereby, creating a footprint of individuals. It can help marketers and advertisers with predictive data on what one is likely to do in a given event. This will help marketers to show relevant ads to consumers at the right time that could help them fetch better returns for their marketing dollars.

Needless to say, the new wave of digital technology trends can reduce human interactions, increase productivity, initiate automation, and simplify lives. Organizations need to understand the importance of this technology paradigm shift, and leverage it to create digital ecosystems and become future-ready enterprises to welcome the next normal with both hands.

Sydney, Australia, June 17, 2020 – Trianz, a global digital transformation consulting and technology services firm, has attained the Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status.

This Competency has cemented Trianz’ position as a differentiated AWS Partner Network (APN) member that provides focused consulting, continuous integration & continuous delivery, monitoring, logging and performance management, and infrastructure as code services. The firm successfully fulfills the AWS Competency Program’s requirement of deep AWS expertise and seamless solution delivery.

With Trianz’ DevOps practice, clients can quickly build, test and deploy code for eliminating bugs, enhance mission functionality and implement cybersecurity protection efficiently, while also minimizing downtime and providing on-going 24x7x365 enterprise technical support. Trianz’ approach brings in greater visibility of most granular details on deployment and gives clients insights on the real progress.

“We are delighted that AWS recognizes the strength, depth and quality of our DevOps capabilities,” said Sameer Zaveri, Vice President – Cloud Practice at Trianz. “This validation underlines our proven expertise in helping customers transform their business by adopting Agile and DevOps practices. Our growth momentum will not stop as we continue to invest heavily in our DevOps capabilities and help clients in transforming their businesses.”

“We are thrilled to attain the APN DevOps Competency status,” said Eric Lucas, Director – Cloud Practice at Trianz. “By leveraging DevOps, our customers can accelerate speed to market through highly automated and efficient processes, which results in increased certainty and reduced risk. Also, our unique methodology for implementing DevOps use cases supported by the latest tools and technologies provides business agility to our customers, which is critical in this digital economy.”

To receive the designation, APN Partners must undergo rigorous technical validation related to DevOps, as well as an assessment of the security, performance, and reliability of their Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions.

About Trianz
Trianz simplifies digital evolutions of companies from strategy through execution. Leveraging its global digital transformation database of over 1.5 million datapoints, Trianz provides digital maturity and benchmarking services, transformation strategy development and execution blueprint services. With a unique, multi-disciplinary and collaborative model, Trianz helps clients transition to new business models, digitalized processes and deliver great experiences utilizing Analytics, Digital, Cloud, Infrastructure and Cyber Security technologies.

APPS Stock Price Movement and Trading Volume

On October 31, 2019, Digital Turbine, Inc. (NASDAQ: APPS) was trading at approximately $7.01 per share, down $0.51 (roughly -6.77%) from its previous close of $7.52. The session recorded approximately 817,921 shares traded, below the stock’s average daily volume of around 2.18 million shares, suggesting a comparatively quieter session by volume despite the notable price decline.

With a float of approximately 73.19 million shares and a 10.75% price gain over the prior week, APPS was attracting attention from short-term traders. The one-year consensus analyst price target at the time stood at $7.17 per share, implying a modest upside of roughly 2.28% from the stock’s recent trading range of $7.45–$7.78. The range of individual analyst targets spanned from a low of $6.50 to a high of $8.00.

52-Week Range and Volatility Metrics

Digital Turbine’s 52-week high of $7.84 was reached on August 29, 2019, while its 52-week low of $1.28 was recorded on October 31, 2018—representing a decline of approximately -10.58% from that low-water mark to the session under review. The stock’s beta was reported at 1.42, indicating it was approximately 42% more volatile than the broader market. A beta above 1.0 is generally interpreted as a signal that the stock amplifies market moves in both directions, which is a key consideration for risk-aware traders.

The median analyst price target at this time was set at $7.50, slightly below the one-year high the stock had achieved in that period.

Technical Indicators: RSI and Stochastic Oscillator

Two widely followed momentum indicators offered mixed signals for APPS at the time:

• Relative Strength Index (RSI): The two-week RSI reading stood at 52.78. Values between 30 and 70 are conventionally considered neutral territory, suggesting the stock was neither overbought nor oversold at that moment.
• Stochastic Oscillator: The stochastic reading was reported at 82.71%. Readings above 80 are typically interpreted as indicating overbought conditions—the original article described this as “oversold,” which appears to be an error in the source material. A stochastic above 80 conventionally signals overbought, not oversold, conditions.

MACD and Chart-Based Support and Resistance Levels

At the time of writing, the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator for APPS showed a reading of 0.35, placing the stock in positive (green) territory. When the MACD is above the zero line, the short-term moving average is above the long-term moving average, which is interpreted as a signal of upward price momentum. Traders typically watch for crossings of the zero line as potential buy or sell signals.

Based on technical chart analysis at the time:

• Upside target range: $7.72–$7.91 per share
• Key support level: $7.39 per share — a break below this level was viewed as a signal of weakening market structure
• Downside target (if support breaks): approximately $7.25 per share

Analyst Ratings and Coverage

Several brokerage firms had issued ratings on APPS in the months leading up to this snapshot:

• Canaccord Genuity initiated coverage with a Buy rating, published June 27 (year not specified in the source, assumed 2019).
• ROTH Capital upgraded APPS from Neutral to Buy in a flash note issued March 30 (assumed 2019).
• ROTH Capital subsequently downgraded the stock back to Neutral from Buy in a research note dated September 26 (assumed 2019).

Across the six analysts then tracking the stock, the average rating was approximately 2.1 on a standard scale, tilting toward the bullish end. All six analysts rated APPS as either a Buy or Strong Buy; none issued a Hold or Sell recommendation at that point in time.

Valuation Multiples

At the time of publication, APPS was trading at approximately 35.81x forward 12-month consensus EPS estimates. The stock’s Price-to-Book (P/B) ratio stood at 16.8, compared to an industry average of 7.9, indicating that the market was pricing APPS at a significant premium relative to its peers on a book-value basis. The trailing P/E ratio was listed as 0, likely reflecting that the company was not yet generating positive net earnings on a trailing basis.

Revenue and Earnings Forecasts

Based on consensus estimates available in October 2019, analysts were projecting the following for Digital Turbine:

• Current-quarter revenue: Projected to grow approximately 31.1% to reach $31.27 million
• Full-year revenue: Expected to increase roughly 28.1%, from approximately $103.57 million to $132.67 million
• Current-quarter adjusted EPS: Forecast to surge approximately 200% to $0.03 per share
• Full-year EPS: Projected to climb approximately 125% to $0.18 per share

These figures reflected Wall Street expectations at a specific point in time and may differ significantly from actual reported results.

This article is a historical reconstruction of market commentary from October 31, 2019. It does not constitute financial advice. Always consult up-to-date sources and a qualified financial adviser before making investment decisions.

What Are Transient Faults?

In electrical engineering, a transient fault is an error condition that disappears once power is disconnected and restored — the same principle behind the instinctive fix of turning a frozen device off and on again. In cloud computing, the equivalent faults are far harder to contain.

Distributed systems face increased complexity: known unknowns, unknown unknowns, infrastructure you will never physically touch, and technology that evolves faster than any single team can track. Today’s users have zero tolerance for unresponsive or unreliable services. With competitors a single click away, any measurable downtime risks permanent loss of users.

Two real-world incidents illustrate how quickly transient faults can become serious outages:

• A Rough Patch (Azure DevOps): Microsoft’s corporate VP of cloud developer services Brian Harry described weeks of sleepless nights tracing a storm of requests to the access control service (ACS) that exhausted Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) ports, blocked authentications, and impacted thousands of users.
• 503 Errors (Azure Functions): Cellenza’s Mikael Krief documented on the ALM DevOps Rangers blog how a refactored extension spawned a storm of connections and threads, overwhelming an Azure service and returning 503 Service Unavailable errors to end users. The incident reinforced the critical importance of monitoring from the very beginning of any implementation.

While failure and disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of infrastructure outages, solutions that rely on remote resources or services also need built-in sensitivity to transient faults. Well-designed systems detect these faults and attempt to self-correct before escalating an alert — or worse, becoming completely unresponsive.

Three patterns address the majority of transient fault scenarios in distributed systems: retry, throttling, and circuit breaker.

1. Retry Pattern

The retry pattern is the simplest of the three and mirrors what humans do instinctively — try again. It is effective for transient faults caused by brief network latency spikes, momentary service overloads, or short-lived connectivity interruptions across distributed networks.

How It Works

The core logic uses an incrementally increasing delay (exponential back-off) between successive attempts, and a maximum retry limit to prevent infinite loops:

Set failure_count = 0
CALL the [micro] service
If (fail) failure_count++
If (failure_count > retry_limit) OR (not a transient failure) → FAIL
DELAY (delay_time)
Increase delay_time by a factor of failure_count
RETRY from step 2

The back-off delay is critical: retrying too aggressively can compound the original problem and push a struggling service into the throttling or circuit-breaker territory described below.

When to Use It

• Short-lived, self-resolving network errors
• Temporary service overloads expected to clear within seconds
• Idempotent operations where repeating the call is safe

Open-source implementations to explore include java-design-patterns and Microsoft’s Transient Fault Handling Application Block.

2. Throttling Pattern

Throttling protects your services from clients that are overutilising resources — whether due to a logic bug, a misconfigured consumer, or a sudden traffic surge. Think of it as a four-lane tunnel managing traffic from a six-lane freeway: the tunnel sets the maximum throughput, and excess flow must be managed at the entry point.

How It Works

Increment request_count
// limit  = maximum requests permitted within a time interval
// degrade = return a "slow down" error or temporarily pause the operation
If (request_count > limit) → DEGRADE service
CALL the [micro] service

When to Use It

• Enforcing service-level agreements (SLAs) on throughput
• Preventing a single consumer from monopolising shared resources
• Smoothing bursts of unexpected traffic
• Complementing the retry pattern — back-off delays in retries help avoid accidentally triggering throttle limits

Open-source implementations include WebApiThrottle and Core.Throttling.

3. Circuit Breaker Pattern

Like a circuit breaker in a home’s electrical panel, this pattern is your last line of defence. Where the retry pattern handles brief, self-resolving faults, the circuit breaker is designed for faults that persist over a longer period. Continuously retrying a failing service operation under these conditions can worsen the situation, cascade failures across dependent services, and ultimately bring down the entire system.

The core hypothesis: a failed service call is more likely to succeed if retried only after a significant delay — giving the downstream service time to recover before new load arrives.

How It Works

The circuit breaker maintains a state — open (normal operation) or closed (tripped). When failures exceed a threshold, the breaker trips and subsequent calls are blocked until a timer expires and a probe call succeeds.

// Circuit breaker has NOT tripped (open state = normal flow)
If (circuit_state == open)
    CALL the [micro] service
    If (fail) fail_count++
    If (fail_count > limit) circuit_state = closed   // trip the breaker

// Circuit breaker IS tripped (closed state = blocking calls)
Else
    If (circuit_state == closed) Start recovery Timer

// Probe call when timer fires
On Timer timeout
    CALL the [micro] service
    If (success) circuit_state = open                // reset the breaker

States at a Glance

• Open: Calls flow normally; failures are counted.
• Closed (tripped): Calls are blocked; a timer runs to allow the downstream service to recover.
• Half-open (implied in most implementations): A single probe call tests whether the service has recovered before fully reopening.

Open-source implementations include Netflix’s Hystrix, circuit-breaker libraries, and Polly for .NET.

Combining the Patterns: A Microservices Example

In practice, these three patterns work together. Consider a microservices architecture where service #7 fails under load:

• Upstream callers first attempt retries with exponential back-off.
• If traffic to healthy services spikes as a result, throttling prevents resource exhaustion across the mesh.
• If service #7 remains unavailable beyond the retry limit, circuit breakers trip, halting cascading failures while the service recovers.

The complexity of managing these interactions grows rapidly — especially when feature flags are involved. A single flag flip can alter traffic patterns, expose previously hidden failure modes, and invalidate assumptions baked into your retry and throttle configurations.

Testing Your Fault-Handling Logic

Implementing these patterns is only half the work. You must validate them:

• Unit tests should verify that your fault-handling logic triggers correctly — confirm that retries fire the expected number of times, throttle limits return the right error codes, and circuit breakers transition state as designed.
• Integration tests should simulate resilient faults across your collective services to confirm that the system as a whole responds appropriately.
• Service virtualisation tools such as Hoverfly can simulate transient faults, slow responses, and degrading services in a controlled environment without requiring a real downstream dependency to misbehave on cue.

Stakeholders will not forgive fault-handling logic that itself fails under pressure. Treat resilience patterns as first-class features and test them accordingly.

Faults Are a Feature, Not a Failure

In a blameless DevOps culture, faults — like failures — are learning opportunities rather than indictments. The goal is not to eliminate faults entirely, which is impossible in distributed systems, but to build systems that detect, contain, and self-correct them before users are impacted.

Applying the retry, throttling, and circuit breaker patterns is a concrete, measurable step toward raising the quality bar of your infrastructure — continuously delivering business value and maintaining the trust of your stakeholders even when the unexpected happens.

Why the Globe and Mail Bet on AWS

Like most legacy media organisations, Canada’s Globe and Mail spent years wrestling with the transition from print to digital revenue. The paper ultimately settled on a clear strategic direction: grow digital subscriptions and deepen reader engagement, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the core technological foundation.

The AWS migration began several years before this reporting (circa 2019) and was driven largely by the paper’s desire to exploit AI and machine learning capabilities at scale — capabilities that were difficult or cost-prohibitive to run on-premises.

AWS Services in the Editorial Workflow

The Globe and Mail adopted a suite of managed AWS AI services to automate and enrich editorial processes:

• Amazon SageMaker — building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models.
• Amazon Comprehend — natural language processing for topic extraction and content classification.
• Amazon Rekognition — image analysis for photo tagging and content moderation.
• Amazon Textract — extracting structured data from documents.

These services feed into automated workflows that tag and categorise content, match articles to reader interests, and reduce manual editorial overhead.

Sophi: The Globe’s Custom Predictive Analytics Platform

The most strategically significant piece of the Globe’s AWS deployment is Sophi, a recommendation engine and predictive analytics platform built in-house and hosted on AWS. Sophi uses machine learning to forecast how much reader interest a story is likely to attract after publication.

That predictive capability directly informs two high-stakes editorial decisions:

1. Paywall placement — which articles should sit behind the subscription wall and which should remain free to maximise reach and conversion.
2. Promotional effort — how much push, newsletter placement, or social promotion a given story deserves.

The Globe has also begun commercialising Sophi, licensing it to other news organisations — following a model similar to the one that inspired it (see Arc Publishing below).

Arc Publishing: Cloud-Native CMS as a Service

The vast majority of the Globe and Mail’s technology footprint now runs on AWS, including its content management system. The paper was the first launch partner for Arc Publishing, the CMS originally developed by the Washington Post for its own newsroom. The Post subsequently began licensing Arc to other news organisations; the platform is hosted through AWS.

Globe and Mail CTO Greg Doufas acknowledged the partnership carried risk at the outset — adopting a CMS that was still being productised by a direct editorial peer. In practice, Arc proved to be a major improvement over the paper’s previous custom-built CMS, delivering the scalability and reliability a modern digital newsroom requires.

Moving from Dashboards to Raw Data

Doufas joined the Globe and Mail through its data science and analytics team before becoming CTO. He now leads a team of roughly 120 people — approximately half developers, UX designers, and data scientists.

When he arrived, the Globe relied on off-the-shelf web analytics products from vendors such as Google and Adobe. The core problem was access to raw data:

“You’d put the tags on [content], and it would tell you as much as you wanted to know about traffic and patterns and traditional web metrics. But everything was just a report. I couldn’t get to the raw data. I couldn’t imagine doing my job here and evolving the business without manipulating raw data. What were my data scientists going to do? Use dashboards and reports?”

— Greg Doufas, CTO, Globe and Mail

The AWS migration gave the Globe’s data science team direct access to event-level data they could query, model, and experiment with — a prerequisite for building platforms like Sophi.

Audience Understanding as Competitive Advantage

Doufas frames the Globe’s analytical capability in explicitly competitive terms:

“Our intimate and scientific understanding of our audience and the content we create is our competitive advantage. No matter how gorgeous the design is … we will leave it on the cutting floor if it doesn’t perform.”

— Greg Doufas, CTO, Globe and Mail

Custom audience research conducted by the paper found that speed, performance, trust, and credibility were the top drivers of reader loyalty — and that page load speed is tightly coupled with perceptions of trustworthiness. Migrating to a scalable cloud infrastructure directly improved the reader experience on both dimensions.

Multi-Cloud Pragmatism

Despite AWS being the dominant provider, the Globe maintains a deliberately multi-cloud posture. Doufas put it plainly:

“Any CTO worth their salt will want to hedge their bets. We will always have a bit of a toe in the water with other [cloud providers].”

— Greg Doufas, CTO, Globe and Mail

He also noted that concentrating spend with a single provider can unlock volume-based pricing incentives — a practical consideration for organisations running AI workloads at scale.

Key Lessons for Media and Publishing DevOps Teams

• Raw data access matters more than dashboards. Managed analytics tools are useful for reporting, but building ML-driven products requires direct access to event-level data streams.
• Managed AI services lower the barrier to ML adoption. Services like SageMaker, Comprehend, and Rekognition let a mid-sized editorial engineering team operate at a level of ML sophistication that would otherwise require a much larger infrastructure team.
• Shared-platform CMS can pay off. Adopting a purpose-built publishing CMS (Arc) developed by a peer organisation reduced technical debt and accelerated feature delivery.
• Performance is a product decision. Page load speed and reliability are not purely infrastructure concerns — they directly influence audience loyalty and, in a subscription model, revenue.
• Commercialising internal tools creates new revenue streams. Both the Washington Post (Arc) and the Globe and Mail (Sophi) turned internal platforms into licensable products, offsetting development costs.

The Cloud Is Not a Magic Wand for Government IT

Public sector technology executives broadly agree on the need to modernize agency IT—improving cybersecurity, reducing operating costs, and meeting the expectations of digital-native workers and citizens. The challenge is that modernization discussions too often center on which technology to adopt rather than what outcomes that technology should deliver.

Cloud computing is the current candidate for that magical thinking. Agencies are migrating workloads at scale, but migration alone does not guarantee the hoped-for improvements in cost, security, or service quality. As a Government Accountability Office report noted, simply moving applications to the cloud does not automatically produce benefits. The scale at which government agencies operate—serving millions of citizens—makes the stakes of poorly managed cloud adoption exceptionally high.

Understanding How Cloud Technologies Deliver Value

Before CIOs can manage cloud adoption effectively, they need a clear-eyed understanding of the specific mechanisms through which cloud technologies create value. These include:

• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces): Dramatically reduce the need to build and maintain customized integration code between systems, lowering both development time and long-term maintenance burden.
• Containerization and virtualization: Allow applications to run on shared, elastic infrastructure at significantly lower cost than dedicated physical servers.
• Web services and microservices: Enable agencies to build, update, and maintain application components independently, at a fraction of the cost compared to monolithic architectures prevalent a decade ago.
• Data decoupling: Separating legacy code from underlying data formats unlocks the ability to apply data analytics, robotic process automation (RPA), and modern collaboration tools—critical for digitizing services and regulatory enforcement.

Each of these represents a concrete operational lever, not an abstract promise. CIOs who understand the mechanics can set realistic expectations, measure actual outcomes, and course-correct when results fall short.

From IT Silos to an Ecosystem Operating Model

The traditional government IT model is organized around silos: unique software and hardware stacks managed independently for each application. That approach made sense when applications were largely self-contained, but it creates duplication, rigidity, and runaway costs at cloud scale.

High-performing government IT shops are shifting to an ecosystem operating model focused on shared services and measurable outcomes. The key components of that model include:

• Secure hybrid cloud: A architecture that integrates on-premises infrastructure with public and private cloud services, giving agencies flexibility without abandoning compliance requirements.
• Cloud management platform: Positions the CIO as a trusted broker who can compare service options, manage ordering, and track usage, performance, and costs in a single pane of glass.
• IT service cost and performance transparency: Makes the real cost of each service visible, enabling data-driven decisions rather than budget guesswork.
• Web services and microservices adoption: Replaces inflexible, tightly coupled application components with modular, independently deployable services.
• IT process automation: Eliminates repetitive manual tasks across provisioning, monitoring, and compliance workflows.
• DevSecOps: Integrates development, security, and operations practices to digitize government processes—rather than simply automating outdated paper-based workflows (the so-called “cow paths”).

Three Core Strategies for Government CIOs

Rather than treating cloud as a technology destination, government CIOs should pursue three management strategies that translate cloud capabilities into agency outcomes.

1. Abandon the Capital Expenditure Model

The CapEx model—buying hardware and software assets on multi-year cycles—is fundamentally incompatible with the elastic, consumption-based economics of cloud computing. Agencies should transition to a service catalog model for hybrid cloud, one that documents and compares performance, security posture, and cost against the legacy siloed baseline. Day-to-day management through a cloud management platform provides the operational data needed to make that comparison credible and ongoing—not just a one-time procurement justification.

2. Apply Apps-Level, Outcome-Driven Thinking

Every cloud project should start with a clear question: What outcome am I trying to deliver to the internal user or citizen? This reframes technology decisions around user needs rather than infrastructure preferences. Agile development practices infused with security—DevSecOps—and genuine line-worker engagement are the practical tools for executing on that framing. Critically, leveraging microservices within applications delivers greater long-term benefit than simply containerizing existing legacy applications without rearchitecting them. Containerizing a monolith moves the problem; decomposing it into microservices solves it.

3. Address Behavioral Economics and Change Management

Cost and performance improvements may be obvious to the department CIO, but agency owners and system managers often perceive cloud migration as a loss of control. That perception is a real adoption barrier, and it will not be overcome by technical arguments alone.

Effective CIOs address this by building outcome-based value propositions tailored to the specific pressures each agency faces—for example, demonstrating the cost and time savings of implementing a regulatory change in a cloud-native system versus a legacy monolith. IT service catalogs must be continuously updated as cloud offerings evolve, balancing encouragement of adoption against the fixed costs that agencies cannot immediately shed.

Business process re-engineering is frequently necessary before digital services can be realized. Many government agencies have had measurable success using DevSecOps environments to demonstrate productivity and security improvements from digitized processes—compared to continuing paper workflows or merely automating those paper workflows as-is.

The Bottom Line

Cloud computing offers genuine, substantive benefits for government agencies. But those benefits do not materialize automatically from migration. Realizing them requires CIOs to replace magical thinking with concrete management discipline: understanding the technology mechanisms that create value, restructuring operating models around outcomes, and actively managing the human and organizational change that technology adoption demands. The agencies that get this right will deliver measurably better services; those that treat cloud as a destination rather than a tool will find themselves with higher bills and the same old problems.

About the author: Mark Forman served as the first U.S. Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology at the Office of Management and Budget (2001–2003) and was Vice President of Digital Government for Unisys Federal at the time of original publication.