Talend, a global leader in cloud and big data integration solutions, today announced new courses designed to help advance developers’ skills with cutting-edge cloud and big data technologies. Available immediately, the new courses are based on practical exercises that maximize employees’ expertise with tools for data mapping and data preparation in the cloud. The new courses demonstrate Talend’s commitment to cultivating a skilled workforce that will thrive in the new information age and help further companies’ digital transformation initiatives.

"Keeping pace with modern technologies is challenging for companies of all sizes. While innovation fuels powerful business opportunities, it also creates skills gaps in areas such as cloud and big data–where the demand for skilled workers is especially high," said Carrie Anderson, VP of Enablement at Talend. "Data-driven companies need to develop their workforce to keep pace with rapidly evolving market needs and emerging technologies. Thus, training courses that give developers hands-on experience with the latest cloud and big data tools help give companies a competitive advantage."

To increase business agility without incurring long-term capital costs, companies around the world are embracing cloud services, while seeking secure strategies to make their journey to the cloud. To help business customers tackle these challenges and fully embrace the benefits of flexibility and scale that are possible through cloud services, Citrix, a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced that Citrix Cloud-based XenApp and XenDesktop services are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

The ability to access Citrix Cloud services like XenApp and XenDesktop on Oracle Cloud Marketplace enables business customers to provide their workforce with more secure access to critical business apps and data on any device, while taking advantage of the scale, power and reliability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Datadog, the essential monitoring service for modern cloud environments, today announced Forecasts, a new feature that predicts when performance and stability issues will occur within cloud applications. While traditional monitoring solutions alert IT operations and engineering teams after a problem has already impacted user-experience and revenue-generating operations, Forecasts leverages artificial intelligence to alert teams days, weeks, or months in advance.  

In highly distributed and dynamic cloud environments, planning for future performance issues and avoiding downtime can be difficult and labor-intensive. By applying machine-learning algorithms to massive amounts of data, Datadog can generate predictive analytics on everything from application performance to custom business metrics. This will reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency for businesses, putting the focus on actionable insights instead of troubleshooting problems after customers have already been impacted.

"Today, DevOps teams often receive critical alerts after their customers have been negatively impacted," said Brad Menezes, Datadog’s Product Manager for artificial intelligence and machine learning. "Our forecasting algorithms have been fine-tuned based on trillions of data points across hundreds of thousands of servers daily. We can predict where a metric will be in the future, taking into account historical patterns, and notify users with plenty of time to prevent any negative impact. This directly translates into dollars saved and better user experiences – something every organization needs."

VMware, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, in association with MIT Technology Review Custom, today revealed findings from a new global study focused on the adoption of multi-cloud environments. The research, "After Deployment Storms, Skies Turn Sunny For Multi-Cloud Environments," analyzed the attitude of more than 1,300 global IT decision makers in large enterprises toward cloud adoption.

A multi-cloud strategy is becoming more commonplace across a variety of organizations, regardless of the industry. Complications around vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, innovation and the need for workload-specific services are driving organizations to leverage multiple clouds to achieve business success. The study finds that while there are inherent challenges in deployment, the benefits are too consequential and only get better over time.

Gremlin helps companies build more resilient systems through a new engineering philosophy called chaos engineering. It is launching with the availability of its Gremlin tool and announcing Series A funding from Index Ventures and Amplify Partners. Starting today, any company will be able to employ chaos engineering to safely inject failure into systems in order to proactively identify and fix unknown faults – similar to an engineering flu shot.

Each year, North American businesses lose over $700 billion a year due to outages. In 2017 alone, major companies including Amazon, Whatsapp,Macys.com, and Slack have all experienced outages that impacted the bottom line and inconvenienced customers. This unreliability is due to the complexity gap in how distributed systems are built. Previously, software ran in a controlled, bare metal environment that introduced few variables, making it possible for engineering teams to identify potential risk and failures before they occurred. Within the last decade, systems have shifted to the cloud and become distributed with microservices and serverless methodologies, which introduced new dependencies on services outside of one’s control – creating complexity for any team of engineers to fully understand. This makes failure and outages inevitable.

Murex announced they will run their MX.3 technology platform on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS).

With the acceleration of cloud adoption in capital markets, Murex and AWS agreed to collaborate to help clients migrate their Murex application workloads to the AWS Cloud. Murex clients are looking to consolidate more and more of their capital markets activity on the MX.3 platform and this means their need for infrastructure is increasing.

New regulatory requirements are also driving financial organizations to use cloud to scale up their computing capacity. Murex is collaborating with AWS to meet the demand from clients to support deployment of the Murex offering on the AWS Cloud. Murex is working on the validation of a range of deployment scenarios, from using AWS Cloud for bursting grid computing tasks through to complete migration to the AWS Cloud.

Vapor IO, the definitive platform for edge clouds, today announced Vapor Kinetic Edge, a technical architecture for combining multiple Vapor Edge micro data centers into a virtual data center that can span an entire city and deliver a record-breaking twelve or more nines of availability. Vapor IO also today announced the Vapor Edge Module (VEM), a self-contained, standalone micro modular data center specifically designed to support edge co-location environments. These two advancements, combined with Vapor IO’s existing edge products, complete a "cloud down" approach for delivering true cloud computing to the very edge of the last mile network.

"The edge is not a box. It’s a highly-interconnected suite of hardware, software and connectivity working together in concert," said Cole Crawford, founder & CEO of Vapor IO. "Our Kinetic Edge architecture and the Vapor Edge Module deliver true edge cloud by being part of a complete portfolio of products, including our flagship Vapor Chamber, all of which work together to deliver on customer needs. It’s not enough to provide bent sheet metal. You need to tie all of the components together with thoughtful engineering and software so you can algorithmically and autonomically orchestrate the edge."

Built for international enterprises with a presence in Switzerland, users of the Enterprise Service Cloud benefit from Swisscom’s tier IV-certified data centres (the highest classification among data centers for security, reliability and redundancy) as well as Switzerland’s reputation as a safe haven for data storage. The Enterprise Service Cloud leverages VMware vRealize® Suite for management of infrastructure and application services, VMware NSX® for network and security services and VMware vSphere® for compute, running on Dell EMC VxBlock Systems. Enterprise Service Cloud customers can use familiar VMware tools for consistent management and operations between private, public and hybrid clouds.