Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing DevOps Solution Providers

www.insightssuccess.com 

August 2017 

The way of business solutions 

Editorial Talk 

DevOps - Bridging the 

Gap between Dev and Ops 

DevOps Forecast 

What Future Holds 

for DevOps 

Tarun Gangwani 

Head of Product 

Grok Transforming 

Cloud 

Operations with 

Machine Intelligence 

and Automation

Editorial 

here are distinctive perspectives in the industry on how DevOps 

Tfunctions. Some consider it to be a shift in IT culture which is 

changing the way thoughts are composed into practical solutions. Then 

again, some IT experts see it simply as a job title, and in extreme cases, they 

consider DevOps to be the direst outcome imaginable for rehashing the IT 

advancement wheel. 

Considering that the DevOps structure is as yet developing, I believe one needs 

to comprehend its fundamental standards, themes, and suggestions. DevOps 

has roots penetrated in Agile system administration and Enterprise System 

Administration (ESM) developments that began in the mid-2000’s, with the 

hunt for better approaches to get things done. 

DevOps: 

An IT Revolution 

in the Making? 

DevOps gives a typical work bench for design architects, Business Analysts 

(BAs), testers, developers, framework engineers, release engineers, Database 

Administrators (DBAs), operations staff, security experts and network 

engineers. Taking a closer look at the DevOps system, it features similar 

principles that are incorporated into the current Agile development framework. 

However, DevOps additionally targets IT development productivity, giving 

more emphasis on healthier collaborations and gives pragmatic reactions to 

changes regarding adaptability and flexibility. The most imperative part of 

DevOps, however, is its capacity to enable IT groups tune their engines for 

leaner development practices, with a more honed focus on final operational 

prerequisites. 

DevOps ventures the horizon where operations and development teams partake 

together amid the entire lifecycle of service delivery, from design to 

progressive improvement, and into the production bolster stage. This critical 

part of DevOps calls for the augmentation of Agile development to concentrate 

on more operational perspectives, empowering greater advancement and 

operation synchronization. 

DevOps, in all honesty, highlights that lacking communication and 

synchronization between IT development and operation groups can prompt 

disappointments in accomplishing desirable service delivery results. I think 

DevOps means to bridge the critical disengages between the two teams. 

DevOps requests a move in considering, as far as not isolating the development 

and operations groups superfluously. It highlights that firmly synchronized 

development and operation groups, upheld by strong leadership from within a 

business, can do much more. 

Abhijeet Parade

Insights Success Media Tech LLC 

555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, 

Dublin, OH 43017, United States 

Phone - (614)-602-1754 

Email: info@insightssuccess.com 

For Subscription: Visit www.insightssuccess.com 

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal 

Senior Editor 

Managing Editor 

Co-Editors 

David Smith 

Kaustav Roy 

Andy, David, Peter, 

Kevin, John, Brian 

Research Analyst Jennifer 

Circulation Manager Robert 

Database Management Steve 

Technology Consultant Vishal More 

sales@insightssuccess.com 

August, 2017 

Corporate Ofces: 

Ariana Lawrence 

Visualiser David King 

Art & Design Director Amol Kamble 

Co-designer Alex Noel 

Picture Editor 

Art Editor 

Abhijeet Parade 

Sourav Mukherjee 

Vijaykumar Dudhbhate 

Vinod, Shweta 

Business Development Manager Mike Thomas 

Nick Adams 

Marketing Manager Philip Walker 

Business Development Executives 

Insights Success Media and Technology Pvt. Ltd. 

Ofce No. 513, 5th Floor, Rainbow Plaza, Shivar Chowk, 

Pimple Saudagar, Pune, Maharashtra 411017 

Phone - India: 020-69400110, 111, 112 

Email: meera@insightssuccess.in 

For Subscription: Visit www.insightssuccess.in 

7 

,

08 

Articles 


DevOps - Bridging the 

Gap between Dev and Ops 

20 


What Future 

Holds for DevOps 

28 

CXO Standpoint 

Grok: 

Transforming Cloud Operations with 

Machine Intelligence and Automation 

36 

Oil and Gas Industry in 

the Midst of Strictest 

Regulations 

16 

CloudHesive: 

Enabling Companies to Adopt and 

Manage the Best Practices of DevOps

Kovair Software: 

Integrated ALM and DevOps by 

Connecting Your Development Tools 

20 

24 

OpenMake Software: 

Helping Enterprises with Their 

Scalable Agile DevOps Solutions 

Ranger4: 

A DevOps Evolution 

Expert Leading the Voyage 

26 

32 

Sematext: 

Helping Organizations 

to Perform Better 

Spotinst: 

Helping Organizations to Run 

Mission-Critical Applications at 

1/10 of its Standard Compute Price 

34 

38 

Versent: 

The Perfect Cloud 

Transformation Partner

DevOps at the Brink of Fourth 

Industrial Revolution 

evOps is an advancing model of product delivery that facilitates better and quicker rates of progress through 

Dthe enhancement of development and delivery forms. It is a working culture that separates the customary 

siloes between development, operations and all partners in the delivery procedure that eventually drives better 

business results quickly. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution presses upon every one of us, many in the industry accept 

effective Digital Transformation activities will require DevOps to be the main impetus. DevOps systems are now being 

used by 74% of technology experts working today, and IDC trusts that 80% of the main 1,000 organizations will be 

grasping DevOps rehearses by 2019. Undoubtedly, it is practically sure that DevOps will support the 4IR – it’s 

occurring as of now. 

To bring forward such DevOps solutions providers that are using DevOps to its fullest possible potential, we have 

come up with an annual listing of The 10 Fastest Growing DevOps Solution Providers 2017. In this issue, we have 

highlighted DevOps solution providers that have grown at exceptionally high speed and transformed the way DevOps 

industry works. 

As our cover story, we have Grok, a cloud analytics and automation platform that detects anomalies within 

infrastructure and applications that is enabling self-healing cloud apps and systems predict and respond to potential IT 

incidents. Using algorithms built on 10+ years of machine intelligence R&D, Grok’s platform deeply understands a 

company’s cloud system using readily available IT operations data. Led by Tarun Gangwani, Head of Product, who is 

an award-winning product and design professional whose work has been used by millions of people around the world, 

Grok is leading the industry from the front. 

Following to cover story, we have CloudHesive for providing cloud-based solutions through its consulting and 

managed services with a focus on security, reliability, availability, and scalability. Kovair Software for providing 

innovative ALM tools integrations. OpenMake Software, which strives to dramatically solve customer problems with 

their scalable agile DevOps solutions. Ranger4, Europe’s leading DevOps Evolution Consultancy which is helping to 

deliver better software in a faster and safer way. Sematext for offering infrastructure and application performance 

monitoring and log management solutions. Spotinst that allows its clients to reliably run their production and missioncritical 

applications at a fraction of their overall computing price. Versent, which is changing the landscape of the 

enterprise digital economy by bringing a modern-day approach to a world of old-school thinking. 

Apart from these quickly growing DevOps providers, we have Editorial Talk – “DevOps - Bridging the Gap between 

Dev and Ops” and DevOps Forecast – “What Future Holds for DevOps.” 

Let’s get stared. Shall we?

www.inonic.com



Cover Story

Transforming Cloud Operations with Machine 

Intelligence and Automation 

“Proactively detect incidents 

and act with speed”

Cover Story 

As core IT has become the center of innovation for 

business, so too has DevOps evolved into a key 

facilitator of delivering solutions to the market 

across the public as well as private cloud. Companies that 

have embraced digital transformation have become readily 

accessible to consumers, receiving constant and relentless 

feedback on how to improve their products. As 

requirements go downstream at a rapid pace, DevOps has 

needed to fight more fires and react to increased complexity. 

They are strapped for time and must juggle multiple 

responsibilities to stay afloat. 

The discipline is at peak demand, and DevOps continues to 

be the lifeblood of an IT operations center, streamlining 

deployment and management of applications and services at 

the face of consistently expanding requirements of users. As 

customers become more connected and engaged with 

businesses, enterprises will need the DevOps discipline to 

help them migrate the solutions to digital platforms. 

Customers expect solutions to “just work,” and DevOps 

provides the necessary capabilities to respond to a myriad 

of issues that can spring up in everyday use. 

Believing the same and utilizing machine intelligence and 

automation to its fullest, Grok is enabling self-healing 

cloud apps and systems to predict and respond to potential 

IT incidents. Using algorithms built on 10+ years of 

machine intelligence R&D, Grok’s platform deeply 

understands a company’s cloud system using readily 

available IT operations data. Once Grok detects unusual 

activity within cloud services, apps or other metrics, the 

platform provides integrations and tools to proactively 

respond to system changes with no need for human 

intervention. Grok gives time back to operations teams, so 

they can focus on building innovative solutions, freeing up 

much needed operating expense in today’s cloud-first 

world. 

Transforming IT into a Core Competitive Advantage 

Today’s DevOps engineers are strapped for time and 

resources, shouldering the burden of the entire IT stack and 

ensuring systems meet the demands of cloud scale. 

Missteps conducted by IT result in devastating effects on 

business, including customer churn and high operating 

expenses. Unfortunately, some companies still see IT as a 

cost-center, providing a means to an end for building their 

core business. 

Contrary to this, Grok believes that machine intelligence 

and automation can transform IT into a core competitive 

advantage for businesses, and helps companies harness the 

data that provides the insights required to make 

optimization decisions on how to build and manage cloud 

environments. They wish to help businesses by reducing 

this maintenance burden on DevOps teams by shifting the 

responsibility of everyday maintenance to the machines 

themselves. This gives teams time to build proactive 

processes to help deliver innovative experiences to the 

market. 

Grok’s open platform ensures cloud-based businesses 

We believe the optimizations Grok 

provides with machine intelligence 

will help support DevOps and 

meet the challenges faced today 

for companies as a whole 

within any industry harness the power of machine 

intelligence and automation. The company’s patented core 

anomaly detection engine provides a key competitive 

advantage for companies looking to get started with 

machine intelligence, providing a much-needed solution to 

a growing problem in the market. The company’s 

algorithms work with streaming telemetry data sources, 

offering insights with each new data point received from an 

app or service. Once an anomaly is detected, the Grok 

platform includes built in automation capabilities to 

respond to system changes with speed. 

At Grok, the team believes humans should be focused on 

higher order, challenging problems that businesses face, and 

wants to give companies more time to meet the needs of 

their clients. Grok provides the missing links people, 

processes and systems in order to create an operations 

ecosystem that automatically responds to business demand. 

An Award-winning Product and Design Professional 

Tarun Gangwani is Head of Product at Grok. He is an 

award-winning product and design professional whose 

work has been used by millions of people around the world. 

With his background in cognitive science and design, Tarun

His work has been recognized by 

numerous outlets, including the New 

York Times. In 2016, he was selected to 

the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, which 

features entrepreneurs and leaders in 

business and technology from around 

the world. 

Before IBM, Tarun has worked in 

various positions in design, technical 

consulting, and web development. He 

is a proud Indiana University alumnus, 

with degrees in cognitive science and 

human-computer interaction design. 

“We have developed Grok to 

respond to the pressure DevOps 

has within businesses” 

has delivered user-centered solutions to 

start-ups and enterprise companies 

within a wide variety of industries that 

leverage cloud technologies to deliver 

innovation to their clients. Tarun’s 

perspectives and work have been 

featured in major news publications, 

including the New York Times, 

CIO.com, Tech.Co and Forbes. 

Tarun joined Grok as a co-founder in 

2016 to manage design and 

development teams to deliver 

compelling user experiences for 

businesses managing their cloud 

workloads. Currently, he runs product, 

design and development for Grok. 

Previously, Tarun led multidisciplinary 

product development 

teams within IBM’s $9 billion cloud 

business. Tarun was a pioneer in 

designing IBM’s cloud developer 

platform, Bluemix. It has since become 

the largest open-source cloud platform 

in the world. He joined IBM in 2013 as 

part of the company’s first wave of 

designers, which is now 1,000-strong. 

Providing Data-driven Insights 

across Multiple Contexts 

Within hours of setup, Grok provides 

data-driven insights across multiple 

contexts, from application performance 

metrics to infrastructure health. These 

insights provide a crucial trigger for 

creating self-healing cloud services, 

reducing mean time to respond and 

increasing service availability. Grok 

believes in the long term, DevOps and 

IT will gain more bandwidth to focus 

on building innovative solutions, 

proactively responding to IT incidents, 

instead of reactively fighting fires. 

“DevOps has shepherded new ways to 

deploy, manage and scale apps and 

services across hybrid cloud 

environments, optimizing the way 

businesses run from core infrastructure 

to API calls on the edge. Without 

DevOps, we would not have the billion 

user platforms with exponential 

concurrent active devices on a single 

network. The discipline has helped 

businesses transform the way we do 

work and commune as a global 

society,” – Tarun asserts. 

Conversely, Tarun believes that this 

rapid growth and expansion of the 

discipline has increased their reliance 

upon it. “DevOps engineer demand is 

at an all-time high, and companies 

have needed to reallocate investments 

in other areas to support their need for

Cover Story 

the discipline within their environments. At the end of the 

day, companies still need things faster and cheaper while 

also being of high quality. As a result, companies will need 

to figure out ways ensure investment in DevOps does not 

overwhelm the entire organization, stifling innovation and 

progress forward. Furthermore, DevOps itself will need to 

further optimize its tools and processes for businesses to 

manage its exponential growth within organizations. We 

believe the optimizations Grok provides with machine 

intelligence will help support DevOps and meet the 

challenges faced today for businesses as a whole,” – Tarun 

answers to the opportunities that come with DevOps. 

Razor Focused on Customer Success 

Everyone on the Grok team is razor focused on customer 

success, which by extension benefits the company itself. 

Each of them works to bring their solution to new 

customers every day, while uniquely tailoring capability to 

a wide variety of IT environments. The team constantly 

listens to the market for the latest in the industry, 

questioning where future innovations can be made in both 

IT operations management and the lifecycle of cloud 

services. 

Tarun believes that all startups should look to solve human 

problems within organizations, building technology and 

defensible IP that meets the needs of their clients. 

“Companies that build technologies and search for a 

problem to solve will struggle to bring their product to 

market. Instead, companies should assemble teams of 

people who empathize with the problems in enterprise IT 

today,” Tarun advises to growing startup companies. 

Eyeing for the Better Future 

Grok will continue to evolve as the world’s industry-leading 

self-healing cloud operations platform. The company’s 

platform will include new capabilities to uncover latent 

relationships among apps, services, and systems of record 

to generate more intelligent triggers to respond to cloud 

system changes. Grok also aims to continue to invest in 

their learning technologies as the company looks for more 

ways to use the data businesses already collect to enhance 

the platform’s understanding of client environments. 

“We have developed Grok to respond to the pressure 

DevOps has within businesses. We hope our solution can 

move the industry forward by reducing the cost of IT and 

giving more time back to DevOps to be proactive, instead of 

reactive. We hope to continue to empower organizations to 

focus on creating new value for their markets by relying on 

Grok to handle day-to-day operations,” Tarun shares on the 

future prospect of Grok.

SUBSCRIBE 

T O D A Y 

READ 

IT 

FIRST 

Never Miss an Issue 

Yes I would like to subscribe to Insights success Magazine. 

Global Subscription 

1 Year.......... (12 Issues) .... $250.00 

6 Months ..... (06 Issues) ..... $130.00 

3 Months ... (03 Issues) .... $70.00 1 Month ...... (01 Issue) ..... $25.00 

Name : 

Address : 

Date : 

Telephone : 

Email : 

City : State : Zip : 

Country : 

Check should be drawn in favour of : INSIGHTS SUCCESS MEDIA AND TECH PVT. LTD. 

CORPORATE OFFICE 

Insights Success Media and Technology Pvt. Ltd. 

555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, 

Dublin, OH 43017, United States 

Phone - (614)-602-1754,(302)-319-9947 

Email: info@insightssuccess.com 

For Subscription : Visit www.insightssuccess.com

Company Name 

CloudHesive 

cloudhesive.com 

Management 

Jim Walker 

CEO & Founder 

Brief 

CloudHesive provides cloud-based solutions through its consulting, 

managed DevOps, managed professional and managed security 

services with a focus on security, reliability, availability and scalability. 

It helps enterprises to leverage the potential of DevOps. 

Flux7 

flux7.com 

Aater Suleman 

Co-founder & CEO 

Flux7 AWS partners provide AWS migration, AWS DevOps and 

other services such as IoT architecture and cloud. 

Grok 

grokstream.com 



Grok is a machine intelligence-driven analytics and automation 

company, providing a leading AIOps solution for enterprise 

companies. 

Kovair Software 

kovair.com 

Bipin Shah 

Chairman and CEO 

Kovair Software is a Silicon Valley based software Product 

Company specializing in the domain of Integrated Application 

Lifecycle Management – ALM solutions. 

OpenMake Software 

openmakesoftware.com 

Tracy Ragan 

CEO 

OpenMake Software builds scalable Agile DevOps solutions 

that enable enterprises to solve continuous delivery problems. 

Ranger4 

ranger4.com 

Steve Green 

Devopsologist, 

Helen Beal 

Devopsologist, 

Malcolm Namey 

Sales Director 

Ranger4 is Europe’s leading DevOps Evolution Consultancy 

and helping to deliver better software faster and more safely. 

Sandhata 

sandhata.com 

Srinivasa Alluri 

Chairman 

Sandhata aims to provide meaningful business outcomes in every 

customer interaction and have the experience to do just that. 

Sematext 

sematext.com 

Otis Gospodnetic 

Founder & President 

Sematext Group is a global products and services company that 

offers infrastructure and application performance monitoring 

and log management solutions. 

Spotinst 

spotinst.com 

Amiram Shachar 

CEO & Founder 

Spotinst allows its clients to reliably run their production and 

mission-critical applications at a fraction of the computing 

price. 

Versent 

versent.com.au 

Thor Essman 

Co-founder & CEO, 

James Coxon 

Co-founder & CTO, 

Eddie Smith 

Co-founder and CSO 

Versent is changing the landscape of the enterprise digital 

economy by bringing a modern-day approach to a world of oldschool 

thinking.

CloudHesive: 

Enabling Companies to Adopt and Manage the Best Practices of DevOps 

Working from multiple offices 

and juggling from one time 

zone to another with 

continuous cultural and language 

differences can result in an operational 

nightmare for organizations. 

Adequately leveraging the potential of 

DevOps can help transform this 

complex dynamic into a collaborative 

and productive environment. The 

DevOps market has continued to rise 

and mature in the recent past, wherein 

more and more enterprises are 

adopting these agile practices into their 

present infrastructure. It should come 

as no surprise that DevOps has turned 

out to be the most promising approach 

for businesses to have a distinct 

advantage in the market. One sector 

that has contributed to the rise of 

DevOps has been the growth of public 

cloud. This has paved the way for 

enterprises to shift their business focus 

more towards managing clouds instead 

of hosting them. One such fastest 

growing DevOps Solution Provider 

enterprise is CloudHesive. 

CloudHesive provides cloud-based 

solutions through its consulting and 

managed services with a focus on 

security, reliability, availability, and 

scalability. They help companies 

reduce their operating costs and 

enhance productivity while improving 

their cloud security posture by 

migrating their mission-critical 

workloads to the cloud. CloudHesive 

also helps companies adopt and 

manage the best practices of DevOps. 

It is committed to the philosophy of 

bringing continuous improvement that 

facilitates success and security for its 

customers, as well as bringing the 

technology community together. 

16 

Unrivaled Solutions and Services 

Partnering with some of the most 

reputable security and DevOps partners 

like Chef, Ansible and Octupus Deploy, 

CloudHesive helps its customer by 

leveraging the best practices of 

DevOps within Open Source and .Net 

environments. These partners have 

controls designed and formulated to 

increase the visibility of environment 

activity, the automation of application 

deployments, the automation of 

implementing a standard security 

foundation and provide 24*7 customer 

support. With CloudHesive’s proven 

security control plane, they ensure a 

protective wrap over a cloud or an onpremise 

environment. They realize that 

for a firm to be successful, they must 

be able to pass critical regulatory and 

third-party audits. It goes the distance 

to ensure that the cloud security 

controls are in place and always 

updated as well as reduces human 

error. 

DevOps Solutions - A Never-Ending 

Process for Continual Improvement 

Businesses of all shapes and sizes are 

adopting DevOps tools and processes 

for efficient development and release 

of robust market-driven applications. 

Agile and DevOps processes have time 

and again proven to be successful by 

laying down the groundwork for 

releasing applications safely and more 

frequently. This has allowed 

organizations to be more responsive to 

the changing business needs and 

provide better customer service. Being 

a Managed Service and Managed 

Security Provider, CloudHesive infuses 

its team into the enterprise workflows 

to work as a cohesive unit, enabling 

their customers to reap the benefits of 

the cloud technology that provides 

superior automation, scalability, 

flexibility, and reliability for faster 

application delivery. 

DevOps provides enterprises with 

endless opportunities including the 

increase in innovation, improved speed 

of deploying new features and 

functions, increases in security 

controls, reduction in human error, and 

sizable cost-savings. Customers prefer 

CloudHesive because they have the 

ability to enhance their customer’s 

teams with DevOps, cloud centric 

architecture, and security best practices 

expertise while reshaping the 

customers internal teams base of 

knowledge. 

An Industry Veteran Leading the 

Way in Bringing Forward 

Innovation 

Jim Walker, CEO and Founder of 

CloudHesive, is the visionary with an 

extensive industry experience who has 

led the company from its very 

inception. Prior to the formation of 

CloudHesive, Jim worked for several 

distinguished SaaS and PaaS 

companies. Among them, he was most 

recently the Global Head of Cloud 

Operations and Security for 

Pegasystems, which is located in 

Cambridge Massachusetts. During his 

time at Pegasystems, Jim was a 

member of the founding team that 

incubated and grew the Pega Cloud 

service offering into a global solution. 

It is also worth mentioning that Jim 

was the CTO of Arise Virtual 

Solutions, where he oversaw the 

security and core technology platform 

to help Arise grow into an international 

August 2017

Jim Walker 

CEO & Founder 

” 

The CloudHesive team 

helps our customers 

automate deployments, 

implement governance 

and increase their speed 

to innovation by 

deploying and managing 

our customers DevOps 

pipelines 

” 

contact center business process outsourcing (BPO) 

company. With over 25 years of both hands-on and 

managment experience, Jim has integrated all his industry 

knowledge into the business proceedings of CloudHesive to 

enhance its functioning and productivity. 

Providing Optimum Benefits to its Clients 

CloudHesive’s possesses a team of experts who help 

companies to deploy mission-critical workloads onto a 

reliable platform to reduce operating costs, increase 

productivity and strengthen security. They help businesses 

thrive in their market by introducing them to the best cloud 

practices. With a vast client base from numerous industries, 

CloudHesive understands that the need for each customer 

differs from one another. For this, they not only provide 

expertise to migrate their customer out of its data center 

environment but also increase its capacity and presence 

globally. Some of the benefits enjoyed by CloudHesive’s 

customers: 

Ÿ Providing sound DevOps and cloud standards, processes 

and procedures. 

Ÿ Helping customers by managing large regulatory 

environments. 

Ÿ Wrapping both cloud and on-premise environment with 

proficient security controls and DevOps automation. 

Ÿ Providing the end to end management of our customer’s 

environments 

Owing CloudHesive’s Success to the Employees 

According to the CEO Jim Walker “Our employees are the 

foundation of our success, and we invest in them, so they 

can provide our customers with superior service. Every 

team member undergoes in-depth technical training and 

participates in partner events, community involvement and 

mentoring.” 

CloudHesive has made sure from its beginning days to 

compile an expert team of dedicated engineers to architects, 

who can implement and manage the environment in the 

most efficient way possible. They infuse their experienced 

team of professionals into that of the customer to help them 

leverage the cloud through a formal advisory process. 

Employees at CloudHesive, perform a detailed assessment 

of their client’s current environment, develop a 

comprehensive implementation plan, and architect the next 

generation of the application, infrastructure and security 

posture on AWS, Microsoft, SoftLayer or Google. 

A Future of Continual Expansion 

CloudHesive has a specific and determined future aspiration 

of continuing its upward rise in Managed Services and 

DevOps practices. They are currently working towards 

expanding its DevOps and Cloud Orchestration platform, 

which will allow their customers to manage workloads 

seamlessly across multiple cloud vendors. 

Additionally, CloudHesive is also expanding its reach into 

the Latin American market with the commencement of its 

new office in Argentina. They are providing an all new 

range of services in regards to developing customer cloud 

solutions, which include but not limited to IoT 

development, large scale content management, Secure 

Workspaces and next generation contact center solutions. 

August 2017 17

Kovair Software: 

Integrated ALM and DevOps by Connecting Your 

Development Tools 

An Application Lifecycle 

Management (ALM) software 

package offers numerous 

advantages to all developmentescalated 

organizations, for example, 

those that outline, manufacture, and 

sell software to clients and other thirdparties, 

or organizations that align inhouse 

IT groups to create Applications 

software for internal use by 

representatives. 

With ALM software in place, 

organizations can improve profitability, 

cost-effectiveness, and quality, 

empowering them to address clients’ 

needs better and use imaginative 

advances that help new or remarkable 

inside business activities. And when it 

comes to ALM solutions, Kovair 

Software is renowned for providing 

innovative ALM tools integrations. 

Based in Silicon Valley, Kovair is a 

long-established software company 

originally funded by Angels and VC in 

early 2000. 

A One of its Kind Firm 

A decade since its inception, Kovair is 

running independently and controlled 

by private investors and management. 

Its major product focus is on ALM 

Tools integrations and through its 

Omnibus Integration Bus capabilities, 

it has recently entered the growing 

domain of Intelligent DevOps Solution 

that is getting significant traction. 

Providing clients with a choice to mix 

and blend various tools and 

technologies, Kovair ensures that their 

integrations always meet their project’s 

demands. Kovair claims that there is 

no other ALM tool apart from theirs, 

that has comprehensive built-in 

integration capabilities like their ALM 

Studio. With Kovair, many process 

capabilities can be implemented with 

their configurable process engine. The 

Kovair team prides themselves on their 

extensive traceability capabilities built 

into their ALM platform. 

Serving the Market with Pride 

In the long run of ten years and 

counting, Kovair has created more than 

70+ ALM tools integrations both for 

major ALM Vendors such as IBM, 

Microsoft, HP, Rally, CA and several 

Open source tools such as SVN, GIT, 

Gerrit, Jenkins and others. It was very 

natural for them to make an easy but a 

very strong entry into DevOps with a 

very comprehensive solution. 

Their background in basic ALM 

Software Development tools along 

with Enterprise Class Workflow and 

Change Management capabilities 

coupled with the best-of-the-breed 

popular Build, Test, Release and 

Deployment tools integrations gives 

them the unique advantages that they 

offer both on the Dev and Ops sides of 

DevOps. There are not many 

companies which can offer this unified 

single solution capabilities as they call 

“Single Click” Kovair DevOps 

Solution. 

An Industry Veteran Leading from 

the Forefront 

Chairman and CEO of Kovair, Bipin 

Shah has been a veteran of Silicon 

Valley for over 3 decades and has 

worked both in the Semiconductor and 

Software domains. He has been VP of 

Global Operations for Altera – a major 

PLD- FPGA company – recently 

acquired by Intel, where he helped the 

company to grow operationally from 

zero to over $500M in revenue over a 

period of 11 years. He was then named 

President of Altera Japan where he 

grew Altera’s business in Japan from 

$55M to $120M in less than 3 years. 

Prior to that, he started his chip career 

at Fairchild where over a period of 11 

years, he held positions in Engineering, 

Quality/Reliability and Manufacturing 

Management. 

His software career started with Kovair 

and since early 2005, he has 

transformed the company into an 

18 

August 2017

“ 

Achieve DevOps 

capabilities with 

Kovair’s Single Click 

Intelligent DevOps 

” 

Bipin Shah 

Chairman & CEO 

Integrated ALM solutions provider and a leading provider 

of integrations for major third-party development and other 

tools with Kovair’s trademark Omnibus Integration 

Platform. 

Ÿ 

with a different set of integrations that Kovair easily 

facilitates to get executed in a matter of days or even 

hours! 

And finally, low implementation costs. 

Bipin holds a BEE (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from 

Jadavpur University, Kolkata and a MSEE from the 

University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

Providing Benefits Like No One Else 

Primary benefits for their clients or the differentiating 

factors for Kovair DevOps can be summarized as: 

Ÿ Ease and speed of implementation with off the shelf 

integrations of desired tool sets based on a chosen 

process or methodology. 

Ÿ A step-by-step approach to DevOps if the customer 

chooses for phased implementation over time. 

Ÿ Very cost-effective solution with a combination of 

existing customer owned tools, some additional new 

tools and about 50% open source tools that are virtually 

free. 

Ÿ Flexibility to make changes along the way based on the 

lessons learned with a set of tools and make changes 

Believer of Open Communication 

For Kovair, the success starts with recruiting the best fresh 

talent and they have religiously done that with a college 

recruiting and training program. The management is 

focused on employee communication with customers and 

what the customers are asking for, which makes the entire 

organization customer-centric in their approach to the jobs. 

The team is focused on open communication for product 

management ideas and inputs, and follow up through 

execution of these new ideas in a team environment with a 

focus on timely completion of tasks. 

Future Prospect 

Innovation driven Kovair aims to continue their focus on 

customer satisfaction. “Our future perspective is targeted 

towards continued innovation and customer successes with 

all levels of customers for helping them develop good 

products through our development tools. This is a vast 

market and continued introduction of new and innovative 

products is bound to bring success with our close dialog 

with customers and satisfying their needs ahead of the 

competitors!” explains Bipin. 

August 2017 19

DevOps 

-Bridging the G A P 

between Dev and Ops 


For centuries, humans have had a propensity to pit two or more teams with distinctive functionalities against each other 

– even when they are on the same team. This dynamic can be witnessed even in traditional business enterprises, 

between software developers and operational staffers. 

The rivalry between Dev and Ops has been prevalent for decades causing one of the most prominent challenges for 

organizations to manage their IT capabilities. Overcoming from this rift and identifying each other as partners rather than 

rivals, can be crucial for a business to attain success. But due to opposing priorities, a friction gets created when they are 

combined, making it even harder for dev and ops to communicate in an efficient manner. 

Conflict between Development and Operations 

Although there isn’t any doubt concerning the various technical as well as business advantages that an organization can reap 

upon combining Dev and Ops, but they comprise of entirely unique goals, metrics, and approaches. 

Development primarily lays focus on producing new systems and applications and ensures that customers get 

to use the same as fast as possible. On the contrary, operations look from a different aspect 

altogether; wherein they primarily focus on ensuring a speedy and bug-free stable system. 

Additionally, both dev and ops strive towards achieving a similar goal of making their 

customers feel happy and satisfied, yet they utilize completely contradicting approaches to reach 

that purpose. On one hand, development aspires to impress its customers with their new enhancements. 

Whereas on the other hand, the operational team wants its customer base to use a stable and tested system 

– free from bugs and operability inconveniences. 

20 

August 2017

The Battle Scenario – Before and After the Advent of 

DevOps 

Before DevOps came onto the scene, both Development 

and Operations worked in an isolated manner. The only 

time they crossed-paths were during the release phase. The 

development team, already notified about the release date, 

intended to interject some new and additional features 

before the time of release. Whereas the operational team 

knew from beforehand whether the current release version 

had any new or additional features interjected. This way, 

before deploying the release to the customer’s site, the Ops 

team performed rigorous testing to be satisfied with its 

stability and operability and only then permitted its 

deployment. 

The arrival of DevOps and its rise in adoption led to a 

paradigm shift from this culture. Developers now no longer 

need to wait for a release date to bring-forward new and 

enhanced features. Instead, they have the capability to 

release new features on a regular basis by using the concept 

of Continuous Integration and Delivery. This has prompted 

developers to emphasize that the operation team must 

manage this regular flow of new features imperatively 

before it gets deployed to the customer’s site. But this 

approach gave rise to a new problem, as Ops have to deal 

with a pipeline of releases at a regular interval due to this. 

They now need to be extremely attentive and careful about 

the quality testing of the systems as the deployed builds on 

the customer site may or may not be entirely free from 

bugs. 

The Resolution 

The most feasible and obvious solution to this opposing 

friction is the synchronization between Dev and Ops, 

popularly termed as DevOps. Coined by Patrick Debois, 

known as “the father of DevOps,” DevOps is an operational 

philosophy that helps to bridge the gap between 

Development and Operations by emphasizing upon 

integration, collaboration, and communication. 

It is the most salient methodology through which an 

organization can check and assure a balance between 

development and quality. In order to reach an equilibrium 

point in this resolution, both Dev and Ops need to embrace 

the DevOps methodologies by modifying their outlook and 

their way of working, as follows: 

From the Operations Perspective 

Ÿ Extensive monitoring of all running environments such 

as staging or production, so as to react and prevent any 

issues from cropping up and spreading, respectively. 

Ÿ Operations need to be much more flexible in their 

approach in accepting regular or frequent changes. 

Ÿ Operations should facilitate an effective and healthy 

collaboration with the Development team. 

From the Development Perspective. 

Ÿ Sound engagement needs to be performed to assess the 

quality metrics that Ops emphasizes on, to track customer 

production systems and quality. 

Ÿ Dev need to be more involved with the testing of their 

own code in the production phase instead of leaving out 

from the field after writing the system or application 

code. 

Ÿ Developers should facilitate an effective and healthy 

collaboration with the Operations team. 

Hence, it can be safely exclaimed that both Dev and Ops 

team need to change substantially in their functioning and 

outlook to successfully adopt the DevOps methodology. 

Adapting to DevOps culture is by no means a silver bullet, 

as it brings with itself a considerable amount of changes. 

But upon successful communication between developers 

and operators, an organization will be able to reap 

significant advantages through the same. The battle between 

Dev and Ops may continue for years, but DevOps has the 

distinct capability to bridge the gap between the two. 

August 2017 21

OpenMake Software 

Helping Enterprises with Their Scalable Agile 

DevOps Solutions 

In today’s highly competitive 

business landscape, it has become 

an essential element for softwarepowered 

organizations to adapt to the 

changing trends to outrank your 

competition and thrive forward. One 

such powerful and an overarching 

trend we have been witnessing in the 

past couple of years is the rising 

adoption and maturity of DevOps 

practices. From its ground-level, a 

humble small-team beginning, DevOps 

has mushroomed to take the center 

stage in the software development 

field, showing absolutely no signs of 

leaving or slowing down. Large and 

small businesses are on the lookout for 

the best practices and solutions to scale 

DevOps across their entire 

organization. OpenMake Software is 

one such company which strives to 

dramatically solve customer problems 

with their scalable agile DevOps 

solutions. 

Boasting a team of proficient software 

engineers – who are skilled at building 

scalable agile DevOps solutions – they 

are driven by the satisfaction of 

helping their customers radically 

accelerate software cycles from 

continuous build through continuous 

deployment. It’s highly automated and 

traceable build, package and deploy 

solution allows their customers to 

master Agile’s last mile. OpenMake 

Software understands the movement 

away from the legacy buying models 

and supports an open source solution, 

DeployHub.org, and a consumption 

based license for DeployHub Pro and 

Meister. OMS partners with RedHat, 

CloudBees and GitHub to provide their 

joint customers with a complete and 

continuous delivery solution. 

Leading the Industry before DevOps 

came into Existence 

Back when tools like Continuous 

Integration, Agile, and DevOps were 

not being used; mainframe 

programmers adopted similar 

principles by using tools such as 

Endevor and ChangeMan. The Co- 

Founders of OpenMake Software 

recognized a lack of these processes 

and tools on the distributed side of the 

house. This sparked the purpose of 

forming OpenMake Software, to 

provide tools and services that break 

down waterfall barriers to speed up the 

software release cycle on the opendistributed 

systems. Its products are as 

follows:- 

OpenMake Meister – Offered as a 

build automation tool, thereby 

replacing manual one-off scripts with 

streamlined, accelerated and audited 

software builds. Unlike scripted 

solutions, Meister scans source code, 

tracks and reports dependencies, and 

performs software builds 

incrementally. . Additionally, it 

accelerates builds using parallel 

processing for the fastest software 

builds possible. 

DeployHub – Offered as an open 

source solution, it is an agentless 

Application Release Automation 

(ARA) solution that enables 

organizations to master agile’s last mile 

– the point where production 

deployments keep up with the cadence 

of agile development. An affordable 

alternative to traditional software 

deployment tools, it performs software 

delivery 12x faster than traditional 

modes at one-fifth of its cost. 

DeployHub Pro – This is a 

professional upgrade that includes 

release management features for the 

enterprise. DeployHub Pro is sold to 

enterprise level development, testing 

and production teams that require a 

safe software delivery process. 

Providing Optimum Customer 

Support with its Professional Group 

of Developers 

OpenMake Software has a group of 

software developers who truly love the 

DevOps industry and strives to provide 

24 

August 2017

” 

We help 

enterprises to 

master agile’s 

last mile 

” 

Tracy Ragan 

CEO 

best-in-class solutions to its vast group of customers. Being 

an expert in working with customers to achieve the benefits 

of agile, their customers firmly believe that they can rely on 

OMS to provide them with an overall solution that can meet 

their unique needs. It is because of their professional team 

that enables them to offer the optimum level of customer 

care and support. OMS points out that “We have experts 

from both sides of DevOps, including the top experts in 

software builds and software releases. It is this combination 

that allows us to create DevOps tools that fit the needs of 

enterprises across the globe.” 

Changing Vision into a Successful Reality 

An industry veteran in Agile DevOps implementation for 

large enterprises, Tracy Ragan is the CEO of OpenMake 

Software, having imparted her extensive knowledge and 

experience to lead 

the company to 

where it stands today. 

She began her career 

in consultation in 

1989 on Wall Street, 

wherein she 

specialized in 

accelerating release 

cycles through 

improved build and 

release practices. 

Preaching DevOps throughout her entire career, even before 

it was vogue, it was Tracy’s broad experience that 

contributed to the creation of OpenMake Meister – the first 

commercial build automation solution. She holds a 

Bachelor in Science Degree in both Business 

Administration and Computer Technology from the 

California State University in Pomona. An eloquent author 

and a reputed speaker at industrial conferences, which 

includes her 15 consecutive years of presentation at CA 

World, Tracy has also served on the Eclipse Foundation 

Board of Directors as an Add-in Provider Representative for 

5 years. 

A Future that Promises Success 

OpenMake Software is well-positioned to be a leader in the 

DevOps arena, especially around continuous deployment 

and Application Release Automation (ARA). According to 

them, “Our open source ARA solution is gaining community 

support and will elevate OpenMake Software as a leader in 

this DevOps specialty.” They believe that their company’s 

growth in the near future will be driven by the developer 

adoption of continuous deployment and the ease in which 

testing and production can repeat the developer defined 

deployment process. This will, in turn, allow the enterprise 

teams to finally master agile’s last mile – the point in which 

production has become as lean as development. 

August 2017 25

Ranger4: 

A DevOps Evolution Expert Leading 

the Voyage 

The world is on the brink of the 

next major industrial 

revolution – the Fourth 

Industrial Revolution. While the first 

revolution made use of coal, water and 

steam energy to quicken and automate 

generation, the second harnessed the 

power of electricity for large-scale 

manufacturing. Then came the third 

one which utilized gadgets and IT to 

robotize generation. What’s more? 

Expanding upon the third, we are here 

at a digital revolution fusing 

technologies to obscure the lines 

between the physical, digital and 

biological realms. 

At an organizational level, keeping 

pace with the Fourth Industrial 

Revolution implies developing and 

deploying new digital services, 

enhancing operating efficiency, and 

setting up an advanced working model 

for IT. This means DevOps – a rising 

model of product delivery that 

encourages higher and quicker rates of 

progress through the optimization of 

development and delivery services. 

With an award winning E3 suite of 

services, Europe’s leading DevOps 

Evolution Consultancy, Ranger4 is 

helping to deliver better software in a 

faster and safer way. Ranger4’s E3 

suite makes ridiculously easy for users 

to Explore, Educate and Evolve while 

lowering costs and escalating profits 

through spectacular levels of employee 

engagement, organization and 

motivation. 

A DevOps and Agile Transformation 

Specialist 

Today, most companies are adopting 

DevOps or thinking about it. However, 

Ranger4 way ahead of the league. 

Ranger4 has found its niche in helping 

identify where, when and how users 

can start to make incremental and 

evolutionary change, incorporating 

DevOps principles and practices to 

maintain the momentum. 

Being DevOps and Agile Evolution 

Specialist, Ranger4 is focused on 

cultural and organizational change to 

streamline interaction and processes of 

IT organizations. Its solutions help 

companies take the pain out of 

managing complex software 

environments, making it possible to 

focus on delivering innovation, fast, to 

its customers, and get the answers 

needed, imperatively, so issues can be 

fixed quickly and easily. 

Three DevOps Thought Leaders 

came together to rule the market 

Malcolm Namey, Helen Beal and 

Steve Green – DevOpsologist 

joined hands and founded Ranger4. 

Prior to Ranger4, Malcolm served the 

financial services markets in London 

and technology organizations. 

Malcolm has a unique skill of 

visualizing the business value for new 

and emerging technologies, and he 

continually focuses on demonstrating 

the bridge between IT and business. 

Using DevOps, he enables his clients 

to gain realization against business 

deliverables. Malcolm has a passion 

for collecting vinyl and an avid 

follower of musicians living the 

Rock’n Roll dream. 

Being Head of DevOps, Helen has 

over two decades of experience 

working in the technology industry 

with a focus on the Software 

Development Lifecycle for a wealth of 

cross industry clients in the UK and 

abroad. Helen speaks at many DevOps 

events and delivers DevOps 

consulting, coaching, training, 

workshop facilitation and game 

leadership. She is Ranger4’s 

representative on the Board of Regents 

at the DevOps Institute and DevOps 

World Advisory Board. She has been 

also listed in TechBeacon’s 20 

Influential Women in DevOps, 

PowerAdmin’s 51 DevOps Influencers 

to Start Following Today and 

DevOps.com’s Women in DevOps. 

Steve has 25 years’ experience in 

working with the organizations getting 

the best out of technology. In the UK 

and pan Europe, he has either started or 

helped run numerous businesses. He 

26 

August 2017

“ 

We believe change 

comes from within, so our 

tools help organizations 

move the needle on their 

Steve Green 

DevOpsologist 

Helen Beal 

Head of DevOps 

& DevOpsologist 

Malcolm Namey 

Sales Director 

& DevOpsologist 

DevOps maturity using their 

own resources 

” 

has developed a razor-sharp focus on the commercial 

benefits of delivering better software in a faster and safer 

way, and is often called upon to help senior decisionmakers. 

Steve is a qualified ski instructor, keen trail runner 

and cyclist and is based in the French Alps. 

Explore, Educate and Evolve 

Even though some vendors have a very “product specific” 

view of DevOps, what differentiates Ranger4 as an 

independent consultancy is its ability to draw a roadmap 

that concentrates on what clients need to achieve. Their 

Explore services quickly establish an accurate view of key 

stakeholders in getting the primary objectives fulfilled. The 

firm focuses on the commercial realities and benefits, and 

ensures that those objectives are at the heart of everything 

they design. Their Educate services guarantee engagement, 

organization and communication that bring everyone along 

on the journey. Finally, their Evolve services provide a 

consistent delivery of the roadmap with regular course 

checking, feedback and measurement. 

Helping Clients Find the Key Inhibitor to Facilitate 

Change 

Often, the clients tussle with their cultural challenges while 

being a part of the change. Ranger4 helps them find the 

missing piece of the puzzle and the key inhibitor to make 

the change. It has developed a suite of tools like The 

Phoenix Project Game and training in partnership with The 

DevOps Institute to help clients tackle the problems around 

communication, collaboration, fear, blame, lack of 

transparency, bureaucracy that organizations regularly deal 

with. Moreover, Ranger4 has a strong commercial element 

to its approach that helps organizations to be value-focused 

and bridge businesses and the IT sector. It also helps 

TM 

customers build The DevOps Loop by employing 

DevOpsologists to make it possible for them to measure 

and track the cost of a feature or idea through the 

development and delivery cycle, and report on the real 

business value it delivers in real-time. 

Leading the Market towards DevOps Tomorrow 

When asked about the role of their employees, Steve 

answered, “Our Rangers create the success. Winning IBM’s 

worldwide Beacon Award for Most Innovative DevOps 

Solution Provider in 2015 and being the winner of the 

worldwide DevOps Dozen in 2016 is a testament to the 

resolve and creativity of your typical Ranger. We thrive in a 

culture of collaboration, innovation, and delivery without 

fear to admit things change outside of our control and to 

adjust tactics and strategies accordingly.” 

Ranger4 looks forward to continuing to lead the pack while 

innovating ways to ensure its customers feel that DevOps 

Utopia are within their reach. “Because if they are not 

delivering better software faster and safer than they were, 

their competitors will be,” concludes Steve. 

August 2017 27


What Future 

Holds for 

With the implementation of modern DevOps 

practices, it’s important for IT companies to 

not to get left behind. In the year of 2016, 

DevOps was all about security, enhancements, and 

containerization. However, like every year, the trends 

have changed quite a lot for the year of 2017. Till date, 

the prime challenge for DevOps was in the 

understanding. According to some, it is a collection of 

concepts, for some, it is a movement. However, it is a 

combination of two terms, which are developments and 

operations. 

DevOps is a new term, where professionals from 

operations and development departments participate in 

the entire service lifecycle which starts from design and 

development and ends in production support stage. 

Additionally, it is characterized by autonomous teams 

and continuous learning environment. So, here we are 

listing out some of the key trends that we can see in the 

upcoming days. 

Till date, organizations have experimented with 

DevOps in small projects. Though experts believe that 

large organizations will fully adopt DevOps in 2017, 

after finally taking the center stage, it will help 

developers, QA, and testing professionals, business 

professionals, and operations personnel to collaborate 

in an enhanced way. 

Nowadays, security is one of the prime concerns for 

most of the organizations. With more sophisticated 

attacks and smarter hackers, companies are now 

focusing on unifying deployment, continuous 

security, and operations efforts. So, user experience 

and advanced security measures will eventually go 

hand in hand in near future. 

Recently, the market has become dynamic and larger 

organizations have legacy applications alongside micro 

services, on premise cloud infrastructure, which 

includes infrastructures, tools, applications, and 

processes. In that respect, DevOps can support 

anything. So, organizations who focus completely on 

software innovation and faster application updates, 

DevOps will be a great option. 

With the increased use of DevOps, modular 

approaches to system building will increase. Gone 

are those days when IT companies created colossal 

products for their customers. Now they are opting to 

employ small teams to manage and accomplish 

individual applications. This may sound weird to some 

28 

August 2017

people, but companies that embrace the chaos to drive future growth will flourish eventually. 

The idea of automation is not at all new. However, the ability to bring infrastructure easily 

and seamlessly is a new concept. Here enters DevOps (seriously, even in an article?), which 

helps to program infrastructure easily, so that teams can develop the software and operate its 

environment instantaneously. Soon companies will continue to push faster, software based 

methods when it comes to infrastructure. 

DevOps reduces the time to deploy a feature to production. As this transformation 

happens, systems will be more risk tolerant. Any of the changes made 

are less likely to leave a negative impact on the system and the 

entire production time will reduce to few minutes, rather 

than weeks or days. 

With each passing day, DevOps is eliminating the 

role of operations. Previously, a big monolithic 

system used to take years to overhaul. 

Nowadays, the time to change or switch out 

the technology stack is taking only a few 

days in order to accomplish. One can 

expect to see more pronounced changes 

in how companies look at their legacy 

systems, and as a result, the role of 

operations will be eliminated 

completely by next few years. 

DevOps ready tools are now seeing 

much more adaption and out of the 

box functionality, which has led to 

decreased traditional silos between 

developers and operations. With teams 

focusing more on continuous delivery 

and improvement, the accountability 

and ownership from developer teams to 

build and run their solutions increases. 

The next trend to look for is big data and 

DevOps coming together in order to create 

predictive analysis throughout the delivery 

cycle. DevOps can automate processes and 

configuration. In these pipelines, if an organization 

suddenly starts creating a ton of data and applies 

machine learning to that, then the failure can be predicted 

easily and areas that need optimization can be identified faster. 

Now organizations are emphasizing on shifting-left of more and more of their 

software delivery practices. As a part of the trend, which will continue to increase, activities 

that were traditionally done after deployment and production, or things that are typically done 

later in the development or release process, are now moving earlier to the pipeline. 

So, here are few trends that will affect the industry to a large extent. However, one of the 

biggest trends of DevOps is not just a focus on engaging and implementing these practices in 

an organization, but a comprehensive adoption of the DevOps culture. Those enterprises that 

adopt the shared responsibilities, authorized autonomous teams, learning environments, and 

have the can do attitude where DevOps thrives will witness the benefits. 

August 2017 29

Sematext: 

Helping Organizations to Perform Better 

Organizations nowadays use 

various forms of software that 

eventually leads to an increase 

in data and logs, which are extremely 

critical to monitor. Because of this, 

organizations end up paying high 

prices for licensing fees and ongoing 

operational inefficiencies. To tackle 

these prevalent issues – a globally 

distributed organization – Sematext 

enters the fray with its innovative 

cloud and on-premise solutions. They 

offer infrastructure and application 

performance monitoring and log 

management solutions - Sematext 

Cloud and Sematext Enterprise. In 

addition to the above, Sematext goes 

the distance to provide Search and Big 

Data consulting services. They also 

offer 24/7 production support and 

training for Apache Solr and 

Elasticsearch to their worldwide 

clients. 

A Visionary who Led Sematext to 

Glory 

Otis Gospodnetić, Founder and 

President of Sematext group, is the 

visionary who led the company to its 

current glory. He is the author of 

several published books, a member of 

the Apache Software Foundation, and a 

proficient speaker at several industry 

events. As an active participant of 

Apache Software Foundation, he has 

significantly contributed to Apache 

Solr and Apache Lucene – a software 

library positioned at the core of Solr 

and Elasticsearch. 

Prior to Sematext, Otis served at 

Thomson Reuters as a manager and 

held the chair of Senior Engineer of 

Search at Technorati and Wireless 

Generation. His educational resume 

includes a Bachelor’s Degree in 

Computer Science from Middlebury 

College. 

Helping Clients with Performance- 

Related Issues 

A decade ago, Sematext was started as 

a professional service organization. 

Their service back then included 

consulting, support and training for 

Elasticsearch and Apache Solr. While 

dealing with massive clusters, and 

helping clients with performancerelated 

issues, the company found itself 

in a dire need of tools that were 

imperative with regards to Solr and 

Elasticsearch performance metrics. But 

due to a shortage of tools back then, 

they could only provide unified 

monitoring and log management 

solutions. This prompted Sematext to 

build its very own tools. 

Eventually, Elasticsearch and ELK 

(aka Elastic Stack) became immensely 

popular among the DevOps circuit for 

building log indexing and searching 

functionality. Their Elastic Stack was 

seen and preferred by the masses as a 

cheaper alternative of Splunk. 

Sematext already possessed a deep 

Elastic Stack expertise, and adding log 

management to the already existing 

infrastructure and application 

performance monitoring was the 

obvious next step for them. This was 

the cause behind Sematext ending up 

with Sematext Cloud, thereby offering 

an all-in-one unified monitoring and 

log management. 

The Past is Always Tense; It’s about 

Making the Future Perfect 

DevOps teams of different organization 

tend to invest a lot of time and energy 

to automate the whole workflow, such 

as CI pipelines and automated 

deployment, as well as in monitoring 

operations. Improvements in 

applications require a consistent need 

to learn from past failures and 

strategies, to avoid any repetition of 

the same. 

Sematext provides logging and 

monitoring tools to gain operational 

intelligence from development, staging 

and production environments. They 

realize that visibility of application and 

infrastructure metrics combined with 

logs is what helps an enterprise 

identify pre-existing and potential 

issues. It serves as the first step in each 

of its iteration to solve identified 

technical problems. 

Helping DevOps Team Spend Less 

Time on Troubleshooting 

Sematext’s Cloud integration enables 

their customers to collect metrics, logs, 

and events across their entire stack. 

They go beyond collecting metrics and 

detecting anomalies by uncovering 

applications’ slowest transactions, 

tracing communication between 

servers and applications, and others. 

Sematext includes a fully-integrated 

Kibana and exposes the Elasticsearch 

API. It works smoothly with all 

standard logging facilities and agents – 

such as Logstash, Fluentd, Flume, 

Filebeat, etc. – and integrates the same 

within minutes. By enabling businesses 

to collect metrics, logs and events 

easily – their solution provides a fullstack 

of visibility through a single pane 

of glass and helps businesses to extract 

value from those accumulated data. 

Sematext’s unified all-in-one 

monitoring and logging solution 

eliminates costly context-switching, 

which a person is forced into while 

32 

August 2017

Otis Gospodnetić 

Founder & Presidentr 

” 

We are agile and globally 

dispersed. Our search experts 

help businesses understand 

and turn mountains of 

operational data into 

practical and actionable 

business analytics 

” 

using separate monitoring and log management tools. This 

switch is not only tiresome for the person undertaking it, 

but also leads to inefficiency as it slows down 

troubleshooting and increases the time of recovery. 

Organizations engaged with Sematext and its services reap 

its unparalleled benefits such as reduction in downtime and 

revenue loss. The company enables the DevOps teams from 

different organizations to spend less time on 

troubleshooting and more time on doing work that helps 

move the organization further. 

Standing Tall Among the Competition 

Organizations nowadays firmly depend upon software; and 

with the presence of software, metrics and logs are bound to 

stay, making it highly imperative for enterprises to monitor 

these vital types of data. While vendors like Splunk or New 

Relic focus solely either on logs or performance 

monitoring, Sematext offers an efficient platform that 

eliminates the chasm between performance monitoring and 

logs. 

Organizations that use multiple tools from multiple vendors 

ultimately have to pay a high price, both in licensing and inongoing 

operational inefficiencies. Sematext Cloud (SaaS) 

and Sematext Enterprise (on-premises) provide 

Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance 

Monitoring (APM), and Log Management in a single, 

unified solution. This enables the DevOps teams using 

Sematext to work more efficiently and troubleshoot faster 

than the traditional log management and monitoring 

software. 

Where Employees are the Pillars of Success 

Sematext owes its proliferating success in transitioning 

from just a service business to a product and service 

business, to its team of experts and professionals. Unlike 

other firms that started building products without any 

revenue behind its back, Sematext already had a very 

healthy professional service business in place, enabling 

them to choose the bootstrap route. 

Otis Gospodnetić mentions that “For me as a founder, 

transitioning Sematext from a pure service business to a 

well-balanced products and services business was very 

interesting. It was a multi-year process that required a lot 

of focus, planning, patience, and juggling.” 

This transition occurred at an individual level as well, with 

Sematext’s engineers who previously worked with only 

their consulting clientele, gradually adapting the roles of 

product engineers. This unique flexibility to simultaneously 

play multiple roles made it a possibility for them to shift 

towards a successful products and services company, 

without a hitch or a hurdle blocking their way. 

Planning a Future that Brings-forward Success 

According to the company, organizations nowadays are 

beginning to realize the value of a unified log management, 

infrastructure, and application performance monitoring. 

This is one of the main differentiators that Sematext brings 

to the table. With each passing day, the company is seeing 

an increase in adaption by smart organizations, which now 

realize the potential advantages of working with Sematext. 

With advantages such as faster troubleshooting, shorter 

downtimes and making the lives easier for their customer’s 

DevOps teams, the company is destined to rise-up the 

ladder in the coming years. 

In addition to their deployment in North America, the 

company has recently initiated Sematext Cloud in Europe 

and is expecting to see further increase in adaption across 

Europe by organizations that prefer or need to keep their 

data within the European Union. 

August 2017 33

Spotinst: 

Helping Organizations to Run Mission-Critical 

Applications at 1/10 of its Standard Compute Price 

With IT-enabled innovation 

becoming a competitive 

differentiator for almost all 

types and sizes of organization; agility 

in delivering IT systems and the ability 

to run them reliably in a cost-effective 

manner is critical. This importance has 

caused the rapid rise of Spotinst, a 

company that allows its clients to 

reliably run their production and 

mission-critical applications at a 

fraction of their overall computing 

price. They provide better 

predictability and high-availability in 

the Amazon EC2 Spot Market, 

Microsoft Low-priority VMs and 

Google Preemptible Vms. 

The Highly Respective Leader 

Spotinst was co-founded on February 

2015 by CEO, Amiram Shachar; 

Chief Architect, Liran Polak; and 

CTO, Aharon Twizer. Before the 

formation of the company, Amiram 

was the Director of Architecture and 

Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms at 

Lycos Global Group. While working 

on a migration project from an onpremise 

to a public cloud environment, 

he recognized several ‘loopholes’ 

which he could leverage to achieve 

better and efficient performance, while 

gaining brilliant cost reduction from 

his cloud infrastructure. These unique 

ideas eventually gave birth to Spotinst. 

34 

With a massive experience of more 

than nine years, Amiram led the first 

private cloud project for the Israeli 

army and transformed Israeli Defense 

Force completely, as a result. 

Entering the DevOps Solutions 

Providers Segment 

The founding team of Spotinst, 

collectively boasts an unparalleled 

experience in the domain of 

infrastructure. It was more than a 

decade ago when the founders took 

their first step as young programmers 

through MAMRAM – the elite 

technology unit of the Israel Defense 

Forces. They were responsible for the 

management and operations of the 

military data-centers and virtualization 

systems. After their brief stint at IDF, 

Spotinst’s founders joined various 

leading companies in the industry, 

managing various DevOps and 

software engineering programs, while 

building and maintaining large scale 

cloud architectures. Simultaneously, 

the Spotinst team members received 

computer science degrees from various 

Israeli universities, while working 

under senior technology executives of 

the country’s leading high-tech 

companies. This super-efficient team of 

computer experts decided to dedicate 

their final project to the field of datacenter 

efficiencies and Amazon Spot 

Instances utilization. Since then, the 

team has been busy helping customers 

to save up to ninety percent of their 

computing costs. 

Standing Tall in the Crowd 

It doesn’t matter on which platform the 

client’s infrastructure runs, the 

company provides optimal framework 

for compute provisioning and costeffective 

utilization with products such 

as, Elastigroup, a software that 

intelligently facilitates the balance 

between On-Demand, Reserve, and 

Spot Instances in conjunction with 

making the right decisions to get the 

best balance between Cost and 

Performance. Additionally, it also 

provides high availability in Amazon 

Spot market, and Google Preemptible 

VMs . Thanks to its high scalability, it 

can automatically increase the number 

of instances of demand spikes in order 

to maintain performance and decrease 

capacity lulls to reduce costs. 

Elastigroup is well-suited for simple 

web applications, containerized 

environments and as well as for 

complex legacy enterprise applications. 

Spotinst also provides a cloud-agnostic 

Load Balancer that provides smarter, 

cheaper, and better traffic allocation 

across public and private clouds. It also 

brings together application load 

August 2017

Amiram Shachar 

CEO & Founder 

“ 

We believe that the Amazon 

Spot market represents what we 

refer to as the real cloud a dynamic 

environment that supports the 

balance between required resource 

availability and its price, considering 

supply and demand 

” 

balancing, traffic engineering, security and deep analytics 

capabilities. 

In addition to that, Spotinst provides cross-cloud 

applications performance monitoring, called “Spectrum”, 

which enables real-time visibility, historical insights and 

event driven alerts on client’s data metrics. 

Spotinst biggest bet for the next few years is it’s Serverless 

Compute platform called “Spotinst Functions”.A Multi 

Cloud Function as a service that runs customers’ code in 

response to events. Users only need to pay for the compute 

time that they consume at the most cost-effective price on 

earth at fifty to eighty percent less than regular Serverless 

pricing. 

A Fast-Moving Industry 

According to Spotinst, the DevOps industry moves at a 

lightning speed resulting in witnessing different DevOps 

reality within every three months. Each and every cloud 

providers are now pushing their various offerings to the 

limits; by adding new PaaS offering on a monthly basis, 

startups come with new tooling and paradigms, and the 

main challenge for companies in that eco-system is to keep 

their relevance over time. The biggest opportunities come 

from ‘loyal’ or ‘satisfied’ clients, as long as the company is 

close to its clients, listening to them and innovating on their 

behalf is the biggest opportunity an organization can wish 

for. 

Future Path 

Spotinst views the future of Cloud and IT in the Serverless 

domain. The organization believes, that the future of cloud 

would be much more flat, distributed, and elastic agnostic 

to vendors. It is targeting to become “The Cloud of 

Clouds”, a virtual layer that allows users to run anything, 

anywhere, and anytime with the same experience. When it 

comes to the product roadmap, the company has recently 

launched its Spotinst Functions service that allows users to 

run Serverless applications at fifty to eighty percent less of 

the standard pricing. The new service, which is currently at 

beta stage, is platform-agnostic and supports the three 

major public cloud providers,and soon will work with IBM 

and Oracle. 

August 2017 35

CXO Standpoint 

About the Author 

Carl McCauley is the CEO of 

360factors. He is a highly 

successful executive with a 

technology background and a 

unique combination of sales, 

marketing, product management, 

development, operations and 

business experience with proven 

success in high-growth enterprise 

software companies. 

Carl has some great achievements 

to his credit. He was working as VP 

of Sales at MetricStream for seven 

years where he took them from the 

startup phase to become an industry 

leader, growing sales at an average 

rate of 50% annually and becoming 

recognized as a Leader in Gartner's 

GRC Magic Quadrant. And as SVP 

of Sales at Zycus, Carl helped Zycus 

become recognized as an industry 

leader in procurement source-topay 

solutions and a leader in 

Gartner's Strategic Sourcing Magic 

Quadrant. 

Carl enjoys providing solutions that 

help companies manage and 

optimize their business processes. 

Whether meeting their regulatory 

compliance requirements, managing 

the risks associated with their 

business, or interacting with their 

suppliers and customers, the best 

performing companies continuously 

focus on optimizing and improving 

the efficiency of their processes and 

procedures. 

36 

August 2017

Oil and Gas Industry in 

the Midst of Strictest 

Regulations 

New standards, highly publicized spill incidents, public debates on drilling practices and the general sentiment that 

oil and gas companies contribute greatly to environmental issues around the globe are causing the industry to 

contend with some of the strictest regulations in the world. As regulations continue to grow in complexity and 

reach, the increased enforcement and improved coordination among regulators increases the risk of noncompliance on top 

of a smorgasbord of enterprise risks inherent to oil and gas companies. 

The regulatory and reporting landscape today is particularly complex for oil and gas companies. The unpredictable nature of 

emerging regulations has given birth to growing industry concerns about effectively managing risks in face of changing 

rules and regulations. Regulatory pressures touch on every part of the business and with the growing number of laws today, 

the cost of noncompliance can be significant. Organizations are faced with the challenge of effectively managing OSHA, 

BSEE, USCG, DOT, EPA, Conflict Minerals, NI-52109, COBIT, ISO and compliance mandates such as Extractive 

Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Amendments to EU Directives, Dodd-Frank Act Section 1504, SEC Rule 13(q), 

SOX, FCPA and other compliance programs based on federal and state regulations. 

A single oil and gas company can face multiple offshore and onshore regulations and standards – from exploration to 

distribution. This could impact multiple sites and various compliance departments and could get highly complex, increasing 

the risk factor. In order to comply with this added complexity, companies need solution that enables them to figure out 

which regulations apply to which facility and assets and links and fosters communication across all facilities and assets 

within the business in real time. 

Noncompliance can result in production delays, cost overruns, unintentional loss of data, and even physical security threats 

to company assets as a result of malicious activity. The cost of noncompliance and its effect on the business requires oil and 

gas companies to rethink their approach to regulatory compliance. Companies now need tools that allow them to respond 

with agility to market demands while keeping them in compliance and subsequently reducing exposure to noncompliance 

and risk. They also need talent, organizational framework, systems, processes, and attitudes that are sufficiently flexible and 

innovative in an evolving and uncertain marketplace. 

360factors, Inc., a leading cloud-based Enterprise Risk and Compliance Management technology and services company has 

been helping oil and gas companies since past several years in navigating their way through a changing regulatory 

environment, managing risk and improving performance to increase operational excellence, sustainability and margins. 

360factors provides robust, well-managed regulatory risk and compliance program that is supported by all levels of the 

organization. 

We work with oil and gas companies to understand their business risks and develop strategies to manage and leverage on 

them. Our key experts understand business operations and processes, and they use their expertise to help clients define and 

develop their strategies, and risk management and mitigation techniques. 

We help companies to reduce operational costs and optimize business processes. We help our clients integrate their 

initiatives in one platform, allowing them to adopt a systematic and organized approach to their cost reduction and process 

improvement initiatives. Our regulatory risk and compliance management solution, powered by artificial intelligence, 

breaks down silos and reduces costs incurred by multiple installations, minimizing the complexity for functional 

departments and compliance initiatives while amplifying the overall productivity of the entire team. 

August 2017 37

Versent: 

The Perfect Cloud Transformation Partner 

The enterprise technology 

industry know as “ICT” is 

operating years behind the 

consumer technology we know and use 

every day. It is nearly impossible to 

get a “done done” outcome in the 

Enterprise IT, thanks to its heavy 

dependence on people, manual process, 

outsourcing and consumption of 

proprietary software. In response to 

this market need Versent was formed 

in 2014 to change how business gets 

done and to disrupt the enterprise IT 

consulting market. Today, it aims to 

break the tripartite relationship 

between the corporate IT, IT consulting 

firms and Enterprise Software 

companies. The ethos of the 

organization centers around Discipline 

+ Automation = Transformation. 

Versents delivery capability comprises 

small teams of senior craftsmen, with 

the right tools, and the discipline “to 

automate everything” to deliver 

outcomes. 

Team of Highly Skilled Craftsmen 

Versent was formed by three cofounders 

named Thor Essman, James 

Coxon, and Eddie Smith. 

Thor is the CEO of the company, with 

more than twenty years of experience 

in strategic and operational leadership. 

He combines a great passion for 

disruptive technology with extensive 

expertise in the cultural change and 

38 

helps to bring together business, 

technology, and financial interests in 

order to deliver noticeable outcomes. 

With the focus on getting it done, 

James is now the CTO of Versent. He 

delivers scalable cloud infrastructure 

for multi-channel digital assets while 

ensuing cultural change is expertly 

managed, and continuous improvement 

strategies are implemented across all 

business engagements. 

Eddie, CSO of Versent is a respected 

industry expert, with more than twenty 

years of experience in the field of 

digital security. He offers strategic 

governance, architecture, and design 

advice across enterprise digital 

solution, with a complete focus on 

identity and access management, 

compliance, risks and security services. 

Entering the Ever-Growing Market 

of DevOps 

The company believes that experience 

comes from knowledge, and the desire 

to improve the standard model. Based 

on this belief, the three founders of 

Versent developed a robust 

methodology that would set them apart 

from the rest. The organization’s 

formula of discipline, automation, and 

transformation is applied at every step 

of the way, and its fixed price, fixed 

outcome approach to IT services 

provides the customer a much-needed 

transparency and security that often 

can be lacking in the IT industry. 

Versent also believes that without 

embracing a fully automated approach 

to business and technology, large 

organizations will continue to be 

weighed down by legacy decision. 

Standing Tall Amongst the 

Competition 

Versent consists of six different pillars 

such as DevOps/Automation, Cloud, 

Identity, API and Micro Services, Big 

Insights, Managed Services. All these 

services are designed, delivered, and 

managed with keeping security as the 

first principle, then full stack 

automation as the catalyst for quality, 

time, and cost. The organization builds 

for disruption, which is the key 

differentiator of Versent. Enterprises 

such as those in the sectors of banking 

and airlines are now the road to 

digitally transforming their 

organizations. Often, they are less agile 

and take ages to roll out such projects 

in part, thanks to the large size of the 

organization. Here, customization, 

differentiation, and speed works great 

and are the key factors for Versent 

when it comes to winning over 

customers. 

Future Roadmap 

According to the organization, not 

following the trends and sticking to the 

discipline is the key to success. Versent 

August 2017

Eddie Smith 

Co-founder & CSO 

James Coxon 

Co-founder & CTO 

Thor Essman 

Co-founder & CEO 

” 

Achieving success in 

the digital economy 

requires not only 

experience, but also 

insight and the 

courage to be different ” 

believes tools and new processes will come and go, but the 

discipline and culture will survive. In order to fully 

automate, a level of discipline needs to be nonnegotiable. 

However, at the same point of time, the flexibility to 

support change, even fundamental ones like a cloud, or 

machine learning, AI, or whatever comes next is 

paramount. It also thinks that change is the only constant, 

so it needs to build for change. 

In the next two years, Versent has three goals, which 

include solidifying its home market, that is Australia and 

predominant partner in security, DevOps, clouds, API, and 

data. Expand and replicate the model outside Australia. 

Grow its subscription business more than forty percent of 

revenue. 

As a subsequent goal Versent is looking to create more than 

1000 new jobs for high skilled technology labor in 

Australia, as a part of a bigger change of shifting the 

industry back onshore and being part of bringing 100,000 

new jobs to Australia over the next two decades. 

Employees are the Pillars 

When it comes to employees, Versent treats them as a 

family. For years the company has watched as enterprises 

have let the technology gap widen between it and everyone 

who use at home. It brings craftsmanship back to 

technology, and provide an environment where diversity is 

expected, accepted, and appreciated in all forms. A 

challenging environment that is best in the industry and 

employees can freely test the boundaries and can help to 

spread the movement to others. Till date, the Australian 

company has been able to attract some of the best 

employees in the industry, mostly by protecting the culture 

and fostering strong, pragmatic disciplines. Versent 

encourages its employees to be innovative, and it 

continually invests in initiatives, like meetups, tech 

sessions, and partner hack. 

August 2017 39

Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing DevOps Solution Providers

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?