So, what can companies do to not only stay ahead of the game but to make sure that they are keeping customers and also transforming with the digital age?

Could low code be the answer?

Nick Pike, vice president at OutSystems in the UK and Ireland,  believes that low-code is the answer. He suggests that by giving retailers a platform that allows them to build functions using low code that is quicker, more sustainable and has faster evaluation times, merchants can overcome the competition.

Pike talks of how a company like Amazon is continuing success through “understanding how customers are shopping and being responsive to changing shopping habits.”

He also discussed the importance of combining the digital movement with traditional aspects of selling and how enterprises need to think more about optimising tech within retail.

The vice president of the global software company says: “Clearly, retailers just want to sell more and grow revenue. Customer loyalty, retention, and omnichannel are key agenda items for senior management. This inevitably means modernising, developing apps and automating processes, bringing back-end systems in line with some of the front-end capabilities.”

The negatives of DevOps in retail

However, he also spoke of the problems that can come with changing to a more DevOps way of working. He continues: “The hindrance around back-end systems is very real. It is all mission critical; if you touch a point of sale system and it falls over the retailer is in major trouble. This means there is a level of suspicion and fear around making changes. To the point where many retailers are constrained by legacy and restricted from doing really cool agile initiatives. It takes retailers forever to bolt on new features, both to their legacy systems and processes.”

These practices can also bring with them the problem that if users do choose to integrate digital changes, they need to overcome issues in their systems and adapt processes.

Along with this, customisation has also affected digital transformation programmes. It is thought this is the best way to maximise value from systems, however, as Pike points out, “highly customised systems are not scalable or agile.”

Changing with the times

The VP of OutSystems goes on to say that in a world that is developing so rapidly, firms are quickly coming to rely on technology like on the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and virtual reality. However, in order to get ahead in the retail game, low-code platforms and AI has been identified by Gartner as having reached their maturity and, therefore, can be used to their full advancement in the retail sector.

“Low-code platforms give retailers the ability to build new functionality quicker and at a substantially lower cost, and the success of ideas can be evaluated more rapidly. Retailers who adopt this trend are able to test new propositions quickly in changing market conditions and with little risk. The accelerated development of applications shortens the time-to-market – in some cases by 10 times in comparison to traditional packages.” Says Pike.

He continues, “Now retailers can extract the richness from their legacy and use low-code to make a quantum leap forward in digitising their business, in a fast, scalable and cost-effective way which means they’ll stay relevant to the consumer.”

The post How low-code is revolutionising the retail industry appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Olson estimates Amazon’s ad business to grow US$16billion in 2021 while believing Amazon Web Services will reach US$15billion.

He also says the American electronic commerce and cloud computing company’s market share is “well above 50%”, according to CNBC. This theory came to light over Amazon’s ad business sales growing 72% in its second quarter.

“While the Street has been focusing on the trajectory of core retail, the growth of AWS and new categories such as grocery and pharma, Amazon’s advertising business has been quietly growing into a massive driver of current and future profitability,” Olson said in a note to clients Monday.

“By 2021, we believe it is likely that advertising operating income will exceed AWS. Investors should be focused on Amazon advertising now; this is a major driver of results and valuation today and continuing in the coming quarters and years.”

He also notes to CNBC that “advertising will be a driver to watch, as the retail industry continues to live or die by the shift to direct-to-consumer and digital channels”.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Amazon adverts to excel cloud computing market share appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE MAG!

ABOUT TEST MAGAZINE

TEST Magazine was specifically created as a voice for the modern-day software testing and quality assurance professional. Launched in 2008 and distributed to an audience over 14,000, the publication provides news, features and practical, as well as professional advice on all facets of software testing. TEST Magazine is widely regarded as the leading journal for software testing and quality assurance in Europe and beyond.

WANT TO WRITE FOR TEST MAGAZINE?

Get in touch by emailing TEST Magazine’s Editor, barnaby.dracup@31media.co.uk; Journalist, leah.alger@31media.co.uk or editor@31media.co.uk.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Read the latest issue of TEST! appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Pal has more than 20 years’ of IT experience in various technology roles (developer, operations engineer, and architect) in the retail, healthcare, and finance industries.

Over the last six years, he has evangelised and led the company’s DevOps initiatives. He is currently Senior Director and Senior Engineering Fellow focused on DevOps, and continuous delivery at large scale in a regulated environment, and is also the community manager and core contributor to Hygieia open source project while helping Capital One build their own software on the public cloud, implementing continuous delivery and microservices.

Public cloud software

“We are the first bank to put all banking applications on the public cloud”, revealed Pal.

“We’re an open source-first organisation — actively using, contributing and managing open source software projects.”

According to Pal, over the last 5 years, the bank has made many, many changes: Waterfall became agile; manual builds became automated builds; manual deployments became automated deployments; manual tests became automated tests; its data centre became the public cloud; and closed source first became open source first.

“Among the changes, several things happened. We switched from outsource to insource, and from vertical silos to production teams – DevOps, QA, Release Managers to Engineers,” commented Pal.

Capital One’s goal!

Last year, the bank’s goal was to “slay the monolith” and to have “no fear releases”.

”There are a lot of things which are unknown, so it can be scary releasing a product. Especially as it’s your responsibility to ensure that everything is working if you built and tested it. As soon as you deploy it, you own it,” added Pal.

“There’s always the fear of speed, fear of being out of control and fear of being non-compliant.”

Nevertheless, at Capital One, they want to release products as soon as they can, safely, with governance being key.

Pal continued: “Governance is a good thing. Compliance is checking the box, and we have three lines of defence – who owns the risk? who set the policies? and who monitored the risks?

“The developer’s role in governance when doing continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) pipelines means they must be extremely aware of what’s going on in their product, as well as implement controls to help; although it can feel like someone is dictating your work when using controls.”

Continuous delivery controls

Despite this, controls can protect you and your company, provide assurance around financial reporting, and are useful towards investments.

“At Capital One, a minimum of two controls are needed for CD, as well as two pairs of eyes. It’s also important to ensure that you don’t change anything without authorisation.

“You can build on every code when automating, but the biggest hurdle is ensuring single developers don’t make changes to production by bypassing all code.”

Pal revealed that he finds using “Clean Room” useful, which is a software engineering process and software development process intended to produce software with a certifiable level of reliability. Its focus is to process defect prevention, rather than defect removal.

“Clean Room is an environment typically used in manufacturing including pharmaceutical products and scientific research, as well as a semiconductor engineering application with a lower level of environmental pollution such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosol particles and chemical vapours,” he added.

‘Software Delivery Clean Room’

According to Pal, by the end of 2018, 50% of Capital One’s applications will be in the Software Delivery Clean Room.

He also noted that, if you’re doing CD, Clean Room will show you have good data and are better managed.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Better governance: banking on continuous delivery appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Under the theme ‘Creating a Better Future’, the Mobile World Congress will be held on the 26 February – 1 March 2018 at Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via, where more than 108,000 professionals from across the global mobile industry will participate, showcasing their innovative products, services and technologies that are shaping the mobile world of today.

More than 2,3000 companies from 40 countries and regional pavilions will be attending the exhibition, including major brands: Accenture, Ericsson, Facebook, Google and HTC.

‘Life-enhancing services’

Eight ‘topic’ tours will be included within its programme: 5G & NFV; Connected World; Content; Emerging Tech; Enterprise; IoT Security; Mobile Advertising and Apps; and Retail and Digital Commerce.

Michael O’Hara, GSMA’s Chief Marketing Officer, said: “With more than 5 billion unique subscribers, mobile now connects over two-thirds of the world’s population. It is fuelling innovation, revolutionising industries and spurring exciting new opportunities, across both developed and developing markets.

“Mobile provides access to life-enhancing and, in some cases, life-changing services. Reinforcing our industry’s commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, mobile is providing lifelines to hope, reducing inequalities and preserving our world’s resources. We look forward to Mobile World Congress 2018 and showing how mobile is creating a better future – today.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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The glittering awards ceremony will take place in October, Central London.

Meet Richard Hilsley – our judge from Aviva

Richard Hilsley, Director of Platforms and Engineering at Aviva, will be one of this year’s judges at the upcoming award ceremony.

When discussing his own DevOps journey, Hilsley said, “I’ve tended to be a big advocate and sponsor for DevOps adoption, to inspire change in teams and IT organisations as a whole”.

He went on to say, “I think that’s not always easy, because companies tend to not understand it. Organisation structures and operating models can make implementing DevOps difficult, and I’ve had to face these problems previously.”

When asked what he will be looking for in entrants, Hilsley said, “new ideas and ways of working that have broken with convention in some way, particularly where teams have had to demonstrate determination and resiliency.”

12 exciting categories to enter

You will be able to enter 12 different categories at The DevOps Industry Awards 2017, ranging from Best DevOps Automation Project to the DevOps Team of the Year.

If you work in a specific sector, then there are also categories reflecting the Best Overall DevOps Project in Finance, Retail, Gaming, Public Sector or Communication.

The DevOps Industry Awards are here to stay

Being launched this year, entries for the DevOps Industry Awards, which celebrates companies, individuals and teams who have accomplished significant achievements in the DevOps space, open on 1 March 2017.

As a judge at this year’s DevOps Industry Awards, Hilsley believes that awards ceremonies such as this one “raise awareness of the topic in a positive way, and it’ll inspire teams to not give up on something, that generally, is a very good thing. It also allows the industry to connect and share ideas – you need every bit of help you can get in IT nowadays, it’s a complicated industry.”

Entries need to be submitted by the 14^th of July 2017, and the winners will be announced at the Gala Dinner in October 2017.

Written by Jordan Platt.

The post Entries for the DevOps Industry Awards are now open! appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

State of Database DevOps survey

1000 companies and organisations from around the world participated in the survey, over half of which employ 500 people or more, a new survey from Redgate Software reports.

With an equal split of respondents at developer level and manager level or above, the results present the most accurate picture ever gathered of the true state of DevOps for the database today.

Adopting a DevOps approach

Chief among the findings is that 47% of respondents have already adopted a DevOps approach to some or all of their projects – and a further 33% plan to adopt it during the next two years, new research from

Notably, rates of current adoption increase with company size, reaching 59% among companies with over 10,000 employees. However, only one fifth of respondents are applying DevOps practices like continuous delivery to their database, as well as their application.

IT services, retail, finance, and healthcare

A deeper analysis of the results provides some fascinating details about the sectors where DevOps is particularly favored. The highest levels of adoption are in IT services and retail, with finance and healthcare not far behind.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there are lower levels of adoption in the Government, education, and non-profit sectors, where a higher number of respondents also thought it unlikely they would adopt this new way of working within the next two years.

The need for more education and training

Among those heading towards DevOps, the biggest barrier they face is a lack of appropriate skills in the team, highlighting a need for more education and training. For those respondents with no plans to move towards a DevOps way of working, a lack of awareness of the business benefits of DevOps is cited as the main obstacle, followed by a lack of budget to spend on new tooling.

Integrating database changes

When it comes to integrating database changes into a DevOps process, the main driver is to increase the speed of delivery of database changes. However, as to be expected, priorities vary according to the role of survey respondents.

Developers want to be freed to do more value-added work, for example, whereas database administrators are driven by a desire to reduce application downtime and improve collaboration between development and operations teams. IT directors and C-level executives are more concerned with the need to minimize the risk of losing data.

While the greatest challenge to database DevOps is seen to be applying consistency across application and database development, 68% of those who have already adopted DevOps practices say it would take less than a year to move to a fully automated database development process.

Edited from press release by Jordan Platt.

The post Which companies are adopting DevOps – and why appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

It is likely that many of us would be unable to remember exactly the last time that we didn’t use a supermarket’s express self-service checkout when doing the weekly shop. The reason we choose to do this, usually, is in the name itself. It is an express service – faster and with less hassle.

Most industries are adapting to cater for this changing nature of user interaction, placing more of a focus on speed. This makes for faster checkouts, a faster refill and even a faster double-espresso skinny-decaf gingerbread Frappuccino.

Evolution of technology, data and analytics

Clearly, this influx of user-friendly, timesaving technology is a direct reaction to the changing nature of consumer interaction. In consumer technology, this is represented by the instant gratification provided by smartphones and tablets that allow users full access to the internet, leaving a long trail of data ripe for interpretation in their wake.

The big data landscape represents not only a shift in data quantity, but in its perceived quality to individuals and businesses alike. By harnessing this surge in data, real insight can be gleaned from customer behaviour to enhance services and target specific groups based on emerging patterns.

With this in mind, the notion that 90% of data available has been created in only the last two years is not to be taken lightly. This avalanche of data, with the right analysis, should pave the way for business efficiency savings, improvements in targeted marketing and developments of more streamlined user experiences in every sector. This begins with a more streamlined and quicker approach to business intelligence – with self-service business analytics.

Self-service business analytics

It is no secret that traditional tools rely on professional analysts to interpret data sets through dedicated knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) across multiple disparate systems such as OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) or OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), systems that are far from straightforward.

Although these technologies deserve credit for the level of analysis they have provided over the years and have been stretched to an extent, the huge increase in data is showing no signs of slowing. This poses new problems for technologies that were never designed to analyse such a wealth of diverse data sets, as well as most staff being unable to provide detailed technical analysis. This results in a performance bottleneck.

However, this all changes when users are given the power. Self-service tools built for more user-friendly data analysis not only allow businesses to save money by avoiding hiring expert analysts or booking expensive training, but improve the quality of analysis. With search-based business intelligence, for example, users can quickly find the data they require through natural language search, drastically improving data access times.

Summary

With the barriers of old technology removed, we can expect to herald a new generation of data analysis, one that allows the wealth of data to be instantly viewed and reviewed, allowing experts to focus on less menial tasks. This is all possible due to self-service analytics, which allows more time to be spent improving services instead of waiting for data analysis.

It’s clear that the convergence of the data-driven culture of business and the self-service nature of society is a technological evolution that is here to stay. As such, companies and organisations will continue to reap the benefits, identifying endless opportunities to better their business practice before their self-served coffee goes cold.

Edited from press release by Cecilia Rehn.

The post The future of analytics is self-service appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Walmart becoming ecommerce innovator

Many Couchbase customers, including Walmart, deploy and manage the Couchbase Server in cloud environments. OneOps delivers an open source tool that makes it easier for developers and DevOps to launch, manage and maintain products in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

“Walmart is the perfect model of a company that is smartly adapting to the Digital Economy. While its retail leadership was built on brick and mortar, Walmart has become a technology and ecommerce innovator, establishing itself as an influential Silicon Valley leader,” said Ravi Mayuram, Senior Vice President, Products and Engineering at Couchbase. “Walmart uses Couchbase and OneOps is a great solution for managing cloud deployments and we strongly support the move to open source this exceptional technology.”

Walmart has built a best-in-class global ecommerce platform that supports anytime, anywhere shopping with reliable performance at peak times. That platform is entirely managed from OneOps. With this, the Walmart platform team is able to quickly deploy cloud solutions that leverage various technology components as a service and support migration between clouds.

Black Friday improved thanks to DevOps

On Black Friday last year, using OneOps, Walmart was able to spin up tens of thousands of virtual machines running applications, including Couchbase, to handle peak traffic on Walmart.com across several clouds in a matter of hours. Prior to OneOps, this would have taken weeks or even months to set up and configure.

“My team is responsible for delivering best-in-class data management services to the Walmart e-commerce team. Like every enterprise IT team, we are looking for solutions that are easy to use, simple to manage and demonstrate reliable performance,” said Bob Lowell, Director of Engineering, Data Platform, Walmart. “Managing Couchbase through OneOps makes it even easier for us to quickly respond to business needs with rapid innovation and delivery.”

Edited from press release by Cecilia Rehn.

The post Walmart Lab’s release of OneOps Cloud Management to Open Source community receives support appeared first on DevOps Online North America.