Final Episode 4 of the ZohoDay24 Development Stories series

In this installment of the Intellyx video series, Zoho Development Stories, we replay our most interesting interviews from ZohoDay 2024 in McAllen, Texas. This episode, hosted by Jason Bloomberg, features Ponappa PM, Head at Brigade Plus.

Brigade Plus transforms sales management and customer journeys with Zoho CRM. Read the whole case study here: https://www.zoho.com/crm/customers/brigade-plus.html

Full transcript of this interview:

Jason: Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director of Intellyx, and I’m here with Ponappa PM, a head of Brigade Plus. So, welcome Ponappa, and thanks for, thanks for joining me. So, why don’t you tell us a bit, just give us an overall picture of what Brigade Plus is, and the overall story of the company.

Ponappa: To tell you a bit about Brigade Plus, I first need to tell you about the Brigade Group, which is the parent organization. The Brigade Group is one of India’s largest real estate developers. We are a 37-year-old company. We are a publicly traded company. And a majority of our value creation is in the residential, commercial, and retail sector asset space.

So we’ve actually been one of those companies that has been focused on technology for quite some time. In fact one of the first implementations of SAP. In the real estate space in India was in our organization. Brigade Plus is the value added services for Brigade.

And our thought process was really to kind of figure out, in the entire life cycle of the purchase journey with Brigade for our customers, we wanted to see where we could add a little more value and where the customer could benefit from their association with us. So we started off with what I would consider low hanging fruit in this space.

We build a home, they buy the home, we build the home. But of course, whether someone needs to rent out the home, whether someone needs to actually live in that space, they probably need to do their interiors. So interiors is the first you know, business that we kind of went after. And we’ve been doing that for about three years now.

And under the value added again, we also help our customers resell the property should they wish to do that. And we also have them let it out and rent it out, should they wish to do that.

That’s typically what we’ve been doing right now. There is a third arm that handles software development and the thought process behind developing software in-house to kind of enhance the seamless living experience we want our customers to have after they move into our properties.

Jason: So tell us a bit about how Brigade Plus got into Zoho. What was your first Zoho app and how did you get started?

Ponappa: I got started by searching on Google and really looking for a CRM software. I went to Google, searched for CRM solutions, and I got Zoho. We knew CRM was the starting point for us, right? There’s a bunch of things you need to do downline, but I think for any new organization, lead management is probably the most crucial part because once the sales start coming in. You know, like a typical startup.

That’s when you figure out the supply chain, down the line. So we went and subscribed to Zoho CRM after considering a bunch of other options. I’ve previously had experience in implementation of SAP, Salesforce within the organization. So those are tools we were already familiar with.

And I looked at Zoho CRM and found a few things that I believed were fairly unique, especially with regard to the workflow management that one could program into it. I was quite intrigued by the lead management and the lead nurturing portion of the journey that we could build onto the system.

So that’s kind of why we chose CRM. But moving from there, I think for us, it’s been it’s been a journey where we have now expanded. We use about nine or 10 Zoho products and all of them, you know, talk to each other. They integrated with each other to kind of fulfill the entire supply chain journey.

For our customer and really the thought process over there now anyway for us is before we look for a tech solution, I usually call my Zoho rep and ask, Hey, do you have a solution for this? Right. If they do, it’s the easiest thing in the world to get it to work with everything else. So that’s kind of how we’ve been approaching it.

Jason: So you said that you had some experience in your organization with Salesforce, but you went with Zoho CRM anyway. So, what was the thought process there? How is Zoho able to displace the well-known CRM players in this space?

Ponappa: I think one of the biggest considerations for me, having worked with Salesforce earlier was the level of customization that I wanted to achieve was a little difficult to do in Salesforce from at least in our exploratory stage.

What we discovered about Zoho CRM is that the number of customizations that I could do was significantly better and suited our use case. But not just that. I think cost was also a big factor. I think Zoho came at a fraction of the cost for us and that was a big motivator because this was also a business we see growing quite rapidly and consuming a lot of licenses.

When we started off, it was me, one member, right? We are about 70 plus right now, and in the next year we’re expecting to cross about 200, right? So, when we talk about scale and scalability, I think cost really kicks in, and that actually compounds multifold.

So, we were cautious about making that decision based on cost, but apart from that, we also found that, like for like, we got equal, if not more, value for money, because of the features and because of the product itself.

Jason: I’d like to drill down a little more on the customization. Because, Salesforce will say that you can customize that product as well. So what did you actually do as an organization to customize the Zoho CRM and how did you go about the customization?

Ponappa: On the customization front, I think the first thing that really comes to mind is with Salesforce. We actually needed a lot of external support to get that customization done. Most of the customization that we do within Zoho, we do ourselves. We have team members who are working on sandbox and are able to do it because effectively CRM specifically is a no code platform.

I can achieve most of what I want to do in terms of workflows and customizations simply by dragging and dropping and writing very simple blueprints or very simple rules. So I think that was one distinguishing factor for us from our experience in Salesforce, which is from 2012 onwards.

But secondly, and more importantly, with regard to the workflows themselves, when we spoke to the teams at Zoho, I think one of the things that became very clear is that we would be able to match and map the customer lifecycle journey end-to-end with the suite of products that they have. We knew when we got into Zoho CRM that at some point in time the entire journey, including the accounting bit, including the survey bit, calculation of NPS, calculation of CSAT project management project issued redressals, Zoho Desk.

We knew all of these things could be plugged in eventually when we needed it. Think of it like Lego, right? We bought a basic set and we started setting that up knowing full well that should we need any other ancillary services, we could always plug them in. I think that was one of the key deciding factors for us.

Jason: You are right, just like Lego. You start with the basic set before long, you’re building the Millennium Falcon. So It just works. So the Zoho applications already come pre-integrated. That’s one of the best. benefits of Zoho, but you also mentioned SAP and other applications. So are you integrating Zoho apps with other apps that aren’t Zoho apps?

And what is the integration story ?

Ponappa: So the short answer is yes, we are integrating with multiple third party applications. SAP is just one of them. We also integrate with a provider, a payment gateway called Razorpay, because all of our transactions with customers are digital.

So, they receive a link and make a payment online either through UPI, which is a payment format that’s available in India, or they use net banking. That’s one use case where we are actually integrating with a third party.

Another place, of course, is with the SAP database because ultimately, for me, we are a value-added services arm for the Brigade Group. I focus on customers that the parent company has already won. And downstream, I figured out for me, every customer of Brigade Group is a potential customer for Brigade Plus.

All of that information, whether it’s regarding their contact information that we may need to provide — make calls or emails, wherever the transactional information that I need comes in from the system. The third and fourth integrations that I could possibly talk about is going to be our telephony services, because we’ve integrated our telephony services to allow customers to have a single number to call to be connected to any of the people that they need.

We’re speaking to, whether it’s a salesperson, whether it’s somebody in design, whether it’s a CRM representative, so we use those integration services as well. And thirdly, we integrate with O365 for our email clients.

Jason: So many organizations that have SAP think of SAP as sort of the center of gravity, right?

They build their whole business around ERP and how ERP sort of drives the business. Is that still the case, or? Has the center of gravity for at least for Brigade Plus shifted to the Zoho CRM product because CRM can be the center of gravity for a business when you’re customer focused, right?

Ponappa: It should be not easy, though, especially with SAP still being as a public limited company, all of our reporting still needs to happen to SAP because their auditory requirements that are there.

Also our teams are used to probably consuming data from SAP, our auditors. I used to consuming data from SAP. So that center of gravity still remains the ERP system. But we’re actually finding a bit of we’re making some headway over there right now because we’re now able to kind of at least convince internal teams and auditors that, hey, I want all of this transactional information is available on Zoho.

I’m going to have it on Books, and Books is equally good, if not better, as an accounting tool or record keeping mechanism. We are actually now working towards a system where we’ll be able to integrate books directly with SAP and push all of that information directly. So there are no auditory requirements.

Your challenge becomes when you’re downloading something into an Excel and then uploading it. We want to just create that link, so there are no audit related requirements and challenges. And as soon as we reach that, I think we’ll be able to actually think of CRM as the center of gravity, at least within Brigade Plus.

Jason: So there’s a question I have to ask, since it’s 2024, and that is: what is your AI story? And how are you incorporating AI into your Zoho efforts?

Ponappa: Yeah. AI is a relatively new project for us internally anyway. I know there’s a lot that’s been spoken about for the last one and a half, two odd years, but it’s really blown up.

We’re using a for a couple of things. First, and I think the most prevalent use case within our organization is to get sentiment analysis off emails and to reply to those emails. So we have integrated ChatGPT with Zoho Desk, and that actually allows our team members to save a lot of time by not going through pages of emails, but clicking a button, waiting a few seconds and getting just the gist of the entire story and the sentiment of the customer, right?

So I think that that is really helpful and it’s pretty good because, you know, the tool actually throws out all of the relevant dates. That you have the interactions, et cetera — that’s pretty good. But we also use the same tool in just another tab to actually formulate a response to the customer. So if I just click on a button, the suggested response from ChatGPT comes in.

And then the team looks at it, analyzes it, uses the relevant portions in their emails and sends it across. We found that the teams use it quite a bit and they’re happy with it because it actually saves time. A lot of time of just typing if nothing else, right? And they’re also able to generate more cohesive responses in terms of the structure of the language.

And that is important given the context that in India and for my team, for the majority of my team members, English is not their first language. Right? And however, English is the first language of business and language of communication with our customers. So it does make their lives a lot easier.

And those are two use cases where I think my users are directly using inputs from AI to service our customers. Apart from that, we also use AI in the analytics portion of it. Analytics for trend analysis and to be able to kind of predict when we expect a certain deal to close, what the average deal closure times has been.

That’s also something we’re finding good value in.

Jason: Very good. So you described a few of the benefits of the AI part of the story, but tell us a bit more broadly about the overall benefits your organization’s gotten from Zoho.

Ponappa: I think My biggest benefit really that we’ve seen after implementing Zoho is that efficiency of my team members is significantly higher than the industry average in let’s say the interior space.

I want to say. I know for a fact that our salespeople outsell any other competitor we have.

Jason: That’s because you have good sales people, right?

Ponappa: But not just right not just I mean, you’re absolutely right. I’d like to believe we have a phenomenal sales team but it’s also the usage of the tools that they have to make them more efficient, right?

That’s something that I really think we’re doing well. I also know that our design teams churn out more design per designer than our closest competitor. Productivity benefits. Yes. So it’s definitely productivity benefits, but also apart from that, I think the user journey and the user experience that our customers get is something that I think is our biggest win, right?

It takes away the human dependency on a lot of process driven interactions that need to happen with the customer. For example, if you have purchased a product from us and you have gone ahead and this is all sounds so obvious, right? And there are people out there saying, Amazon’s doing it, right?

And there are high tech companies that are doing it. What we have to keep in mind is we are not a tech company. We’re a brick-and-mortar real estate company and adoption of tech in real estate, at least in India, is extremely low, right?

So actually it’s quite in the traditional sense, now, not groundbreaking, but if you look at it from an industry perspective, the fact that when a customer makes a payment, they immediately get an email acknowledging that the payment has been made, and saying that “so-and-so is the designer that has been assigned to you.”

The designer will call you in 48 hours. The task is being set for the designer automatically. The knowledge transfer is being done automatically between two modules. The reminder going to the designer saying that, hey, read this file so you have the knowledge transfer. Call this customer on such and such time, preschedule the call, automating the emails that goes out, automating the calls that go out.

This significantly improves the customers experience and therefore their expectation of us. Because depending on how you talk to a customer, this could vary, right? You and 20 other salespeople all have their style and method off interacting with customers.

But as a brand, we’d like to maintain some level off I would say uniformity. In the language that we use, in the way we’d like to communicate and again, coming back to the fact some of these things I know out here at least in the U.S. you may take for granted, but given that again, English is not the first language for a lot of the team members, I think it is important to give them the additional help that could actually enhance the customer experience.

Very good.

Jason: So final question. What’s next? What is your future with the Zoho product line?

Ponappa: The way we’ve approached it so far like I think I touched upon it at the beginning of my interview. Now whenever I need a tech solution, I usually call my Zoho rep and say, Hey, do you have a solution for this?

And it’s when they say, no, we don’t have it is when I start looking outside. But I think brass tacks, the way we’d like to look at it is we’d want our end to end journey, including our financial transactions and settlements to happen on Zoho, because I think there is a huge opportunity that we are not capitalizing on right now by leaving that accounting part out of the equation.

And I feel like when we bring that in, the end-to-end customer journey is going to be significantly more enriched, and therefore lead to better future conversions for me and better customer experience and better brand equity for us.

Jason: Well, thank you very much. That’s all the time we have. So we’ve been speaking with Ponappa from Brigade Plus.

This is Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx. Thank you very much.

Ponappa: Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it.

Watch the whole interview on the Intellyx YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/-9erz0HOKXY

©2024 Intellyx, B.V. At the time of recording, Zoho is an Intellyx customer, and SAP and Microsoft are former Intellyx customers. No other organizations mentioned here are Intellyx customers.

BrainBlog for Evolven Software by Jason Bloomberg

Balancing Risk, Cost, and Resolution Efficiency

Problem resolution efficiency (PRE, or sometimes simply resolution efficiency) is an important key performance indicator (KPI) for operations teams.

Equal to the ratio of the number of resolved problems to the number of raised problems in a given time interval, resolution efficiency gives managers a way of ensuring the proper allocation of ops resources while also providing sufficient attention to continuous improvement efforts.

To raise resolution efficiency, the ops team must either increase the number of resolved problems or decrease the number of problems it raised in the first place. As with other KPIs, however, it’s easy to monkey with the numbers by intentionally avoiding raising a problem.

Making judgment calls about whether to raise a problem can impact the resulting resolution efficiency – without actually improving the resolution of problems.

Click here to read the entire article.

Article for WireMock Cloud in DevOps.com

“Soon we’ll be making another run…And love, exciting and new, Come aboard, we’re expecting you…”
– Theme from The Love Boat, American television program, circa 1977

If software is eating the world, then APIs are eating software. Investment in the API economy is increasing. More than 200 million APIs are already out there in the world, and more than 24,000 are publicly available as of 2022, and surely these figures have only skyrocketed since then.

APIs were supposed to ease the journey of creating innovative new features and services within internal and external-facing applications, while making integration smooth sailing.

Unfortunately, leveraging API services within your own application development process often feels less like stepping onto the welcoming deck of The Love Boat, and more like getting marooned on an island for the next season of Survivor.

Barriers to API onboarding

The process of adding some API calls to an application seems quite simple in comparison to the old days of web services and integration buses. A provider publishes an API with a Open API spec, and developers connect to it. Unfortunately, onboarding seldom works out that simply for several reasons:

• Poor documentation. While there may be a Swagger or Postman file sitting there for reference, chances are the documentation isn’t updated as often as the API, nor does it provide helpful instructions or code samples that help developers structure their own calls.
• Inconsistently available sandboxes. All too often, there isn’t a reliable way to try out the API, thereby wasting developer’s time and impacting quality…

Read the whole article on Techstrong’s DevOps.com here: https://devops.com/smoothing-api-onboarding-with-simulation-and-documentation/

©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. No AI bots were used to write this content. Image source: Adobe Express AI. At the time of writing, WireMock is an Intellyx customer.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

Since we last wrote about Appdome in May, 2023, they’ve added some new capabilities to their mobile cybersecurity threat defense product suite. 

Moblie apps in regulated industries such as gambling and banking depend on accurate geo location data to enforce their policies and prevent fraud. 

Appdome’s latest release detects and blocks fake and banned GPS locations, fraudulent VPNs, and teleportation attacks.

Social engineering attacks are a significant cause of incidents and breaches, and mobile phone apps are a growing source of such attacks. 

Appdome’s latest release detects and blocks mobile app takeover attempts for phishing, remote desktop control manipulations, facial recognition bypass, SIM swapping, and fake apps.   

Customers configure and automatically deploy the new capabilities the same way they use existing Appdome protections.

Appdome’s mobile app protection software deploys with the app’s CI/CD pipeline automation, and uniquely runs within the application, allowing developers to capture alerts and take immediate action.

Appdome can also send alerts to a security monitoring dashboard to alert security operations teams of a threat or incident. 

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. Appdome is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

SydeLabs is implementing a generative AI (genAI) security and risk management solution that delivers automated AI ‘red teaming’ (threat discovery) and real-time intent-based protection against AI-centric attacks.

The red teaming capability continually evaluates genAI deployments for common vulnerabilities like data leakage and policy violations.

SydeLabs’ intent-based protection acts as a prompt firewall that evaluates the user intent behind prompts to determine whether a particular prompt may be malicious.

The intent-based protection works on the prompt, session, and user levels, and is thus able to extract the context across multiple prompts or sessions to uncover malicious intent.

Both tools report threat scores that give operators the information they need to prioritize mitigation activities.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

When we last covered Pulumi in April 2020, it was rolling out its open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) provisioning platform.

In the intervening time, the company has matured its IaC platform, adding AI capabilities to support developer productivity.

Today, Pulumi differentiates itself from competing IaC platforms with its polyglot approach, supporting different languages for crafting IaC scripts.

In fact, Pulumi combines support for imperative languages for flexible programmability on top of its declarative core, which gives its customers the ‘cattle, not pets’ approach to immutable infrastructure that is necessary for making IaC both scalable and maintainable.

More recently, Pulumi has been adding multi-cloud deployment capabilities, AI-supported search and analytics insights, as well as support for flexible, user-defined environments.

Pulumi also offers deployment observability as well as supporting customers’ platform engineering efforts, making the platform difficult to categorize.

Pulumi’s software is open-source, while its commercial offering is a cloud-based, managed implementation of its platform.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

SandboxAQ offers an cryptography management system for discovering where and how encrypted data occurs and improving its security posture, wherever it is implemented across an extended enterprise application and data estate.

When I first saw SandboxAQ in my inbox, I immediately thought it was a test-bed solution for automated quality professionals, but as it turns out, the “AQ” in their name refers to avoiding the emerging risks of combining artificial intelligence (A) and quantum computing (Q) to solve encryption schemes. Still, in a sense, cryptographic assets do not have an unlimited shelf life and therefore quality really matters: they need continuous monitoring, debugging, and policy-based management.

There will always be an arms race in cryptography, as ever-more-sophisticated encryption schemes risk getting decrypted or compromised by ever-more-sophisticated cyberattacks, powered by quantum computing algorithms and adaptive AI-driven routines.

By giving cryptography discovery and management its own observability layer, a SecOps team can centrally set policies for zero-trust security, data privacy, and compliance, while serving up dashboards for cryptographic health and remediation efforts.

So for instance if there is an obsolete RSA algorithm used to encrypt a healthcare database, that vulnerability can be discovered and modernized by the team, hopefully before an attacker notices the handhold was available. Similarly, older encryption schemes can cause an IT team to schedule certain areas of the cryptographic estate for modernization with more modern, leaner approaches.

Copyright ©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. At the time of writing, SandboxAQ is not an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article or event visit, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Article for Data Centre News UK by Catherine Knowles

Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director of analyst firm Intellyx, noted that GenAI is still an emerging technology, but it already promises to disrupt how organisations operate and engage with customers and employees. He highlighted that GenAI can effectively address the data management, security, and search challenges many businesses continue to encounter.

Click here to read the entire article.

It seems like every vendor is pushing an AI-washed story these days. Generative AI hype is at an all-time high thanks to ChatGPT, Midjourney, and many newer startups and projects. Companies that fear missing out on the next big thing are spending money on AI functionality as a loss leader, or slapping an LLM chatbot in front of their apps.

It makes me wonder: Wait a minute, is this really going to help customers? And, how are we supposed to start making money from so much AI hype? 

For most companies, building out a complete AI stack would be prohibitively expensive and resource intensive. Who has the money and resources to literally design their own AI, and how would the new venture make enough money to stay afloat, considering massive R&D and infrastructure costs?

Overinvestment in AI is not the answer

Right now, venture capital is on the hunt for any startup claiming to revolutionize machine learning or use GenAI in some novel way. Tech titans are placing big bets on tools in the sector. Will another project even come close to getting $10 billion dollars for a minority share like OpenAI got from Microsoft? 

You never know what might happen up there in the stratosphere. For the rest of our efforts here on Earth, we can run experiments, but we will only be able to meaningfully adopt AI once it provides business value for customers.

Eventually the bills will come due on so many AI projects, and there will be a great reckoning that will divide the products that can find a market niche and help companies capture revenue, from those that won’t. 

The cost of infrastructure will get really high, really fast, as will the cost of GPUs, data ingress/egress, and architecture. Companies large and small will struggle finding any experienced AI modeling experts or machine learning data scientists willing to start working on yet another project.

A supply chain of loosely coupled composite AI applications

If enterprises want to see a return on their AI investments, they must prove that their chosen strategy is applicable to real-world business and societal problems, rather than serving as window dressing.

Since we can’t depend on just one form of AI, to get there, we’ll need composite AI – a supply chain consisting of multiple AI suppliers, with multiple models and multiple training data sets working together in a loosely-coupled fashion, based on the right fit for the job…

– Read the entire BrainBlog on the Amberflo site here:  https://www.amberflo.io/blog/intellyx-brainblog-monetizing-generative-ai-starts-with-metering 

©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. No AI bots were used to write this content. At the time of writing, Amberflo is an Intellyx client. Image source: Adobe Express.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

StackGuardian provides simplicity, control, and visibility to cloud infrastructure provisioning via continuous optimization of cloud configurations while leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) reference architecture blueprints.

Operators use StackGuardian to establish cloud configuration guardrails. The platform then optimizes infrastructure specifications via pre-built IaC templates that operators can configure to meet specific requirements.

In production, StackGuardian deploys these architectural blueprints while enforcing preconfigured cloud policies. It then continuously verifies that cloud environment configurations conform to the established policies, reducing the chance of configuration drift.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Meshcloud provides a cloud management platform that provides transparency and configuration control across multiple clouds.

Meshcloud helps centralized IT functions at large enterprises support the diverse cloud requirements of multiple business departments within their organizations.

The company also helps organizations manage cloud costs while facilitating the migration to multi-cloud environments.

Leveraging collaboration with its customer base, Meshcloud has implemented a cloud foundation maturity model methodology that supports its cloud foundation maturity assessment services offering.

Meshcloud also provides configurable multi-cloud governance as well as hands-on assistance with Azure Landing Zones.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Rapid7 offers managed detection and response (MDR), security information and event management (SIEM), cloud security, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and exposure management via its AWS-based cybersecurity platform.

Rapid7’s heritage is risk management and penetration testing, and its focus on risk management is still its core differentiator.

Among its many capabilities is ransomware detection. Rapid7 can often identify ransomware attacks before they do any damage.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Fourthline supports its customers’ know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory compliance requirements with a suite of identity verification tools and features.

Specifically, Fourthline offers biometrics, digital and physical proof of address, AML screening, anti-fraud checks, risk scoring, document and selfie liveness, and qualified electronic signatures.

Fourthline’s services are accessible primarily by APIs.

Fourthline’s focus is on individual users, for example to identify sanctioned individuals. It also provides company verification for B2B customers.

Fourthline primarily serves banks and other financial services organizations with strict identity verification compliance requirements.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

When we last spoke with Cortex in February 2022, the company offered an observability platform for engineering collaboration.

Today, the company has expanded its capabilities past observability, as it has thrown its hat into the crowded platform engineering space with an internal development platform (IDP).

Platform engineering offerings run the gamut from platforms for building IDPs to spec to opinionated IDPs that customers can deploy directly. Cortex falls into the latter category.

As an IDP, Cortex takes an opinionated view about how best to execute CI/CD tasks and workflows. That being said, the platform can integrate with a variety of DevOps tools and supports customization by platform engineers.

Cortex’s platform capabilities include catalogs, scorecards, initiatives, scaffolding, workflows, and plugins.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

VIAVI offers a range of network performance and threat management solutions including cloud, end-user experience, and network performance monitoring.

Its threat exposure management offering leverages deep visibility into network behavior to analyze its customers’ AWS environments to pinpoint vulnerabilities and provide visibility into their security postures.

VIAVI leverages a variety of network data sources including deep packet inspection, SNMP, syslogs, AWS monitoring data, Active Directory metadata, and other data feeds. It then correlates data with user IDs, IP addresses, and MAC addresses.

VIAVI then enriches these network data to provide real-time insight into vulnerabilities and threats on the network while continuously monitoring for new vulnerabilities and indicators of compromise.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Cambrian Technologies is a managed services provider (MSP) that helps independent software vendors (ISVs) optimize their SaaS-based offerings via a professional services offering that includes cloud strategy, implementation, and innovation.

Cambrian offers services on AWS, helping its customers choose between AWS and Azure for its SaaS-based services. In particular, Cambrian helps ISVs migrate Windows workloads to Linux environments on AWS.

Cambrian helps position AWS as the preferred environment for Windows workloads by emphasizing cost savings over Azure via reduced Microsoft licensing costs coupled with better performance at the hardware and hypervisor layers.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. Microsoft is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

BrainBlog for vFunction by Jason Bloomberg

Enterprises have been implementing digital transformation initiatives for over a decade, but even now, most of those efforts fall short. What gives?

Digital leaders frequently focus the effort on software. Software, however, is not the point of digital transformation. Such transformation is indeed software-powered, but even more so, it is customer-driven.

Customer-driven change as broad as digital transformation is difficult and risky. More often than not, the organization’s software efforts aren’t up to the task.

Instead of focusing digital efforts solely on software, organizations must adopt change as a core competency. Digital transformation represents ongoing, transformative change across the organization, not just its software initiatives.

Architecture is at the Center of Digital Transformation

Nevertheless, software must power the transformation — and if software fails to deal well with change, then the organization will fail as well.

Technical debt, therefore, can become the primary roadblock to digital transformation – the ball and chain that impedes software change, and with it, the organization’s broader digital transformation efforts. As a result, digital transformation raises the bar on resolving technical debt. No longer is such debt solely an IT cost concern. It now impedes digital transformation broadly – and with it, the organization’s competitive advantage.

Digital transformation success depends upon resolving issues of technical debt beyond software itself. Such debt, after all, includes obsolete ways of thinking and doing things, not just obsolete code.

The missing element that links software to these broader business transformation concerns is architecture.

Click here to read the entire article.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Propel delivers a set of components and tools to their partners for developing external analytics solutions. 

Their mission is to simplify the process of creating analytics engines. They noticed that modern businesses generate tons of data but don’t usually have a good way to share it externally with their customers. 

Customer-facing analytics have different requirements than internally-facing analytics. The requirements tend to fall into three major categories: low latency, high refresh rates, and flexible delivery. 

The Propel platform lets you prioritize these requirements and balance the solution cost according to what’s most important to your customers. 

Propel’s capabilities include ingesting data into a cloud database using data models designed to support analytics use cases as well as several mechanisms to expose analytics derived from that data (i.e. using SQL or APIs). 

Analytics are not “one size fits all.” Their customers, typically other software vendors, pick and choose the right capabilities to simplify the task of meeting their analytics requirements.    

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to produce this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

On-demand webinar featuring Eric Newcomer and Jason Bloomberg for Appdome and NowSecure

In this exclusive webinar, our presenters will reveal real operating “dos” and “don’ts” and point out the crucial strategies, tools, and techniques that empower organizations to seamlessly integrate security into every phase of the mobile development lifecycle.

By:
Eric Newcomer – CTO at Intellyx
Andrew Hoog – Co-Founder at NowSecure
Tom Tovar – CEO at Appdome
Jason Bloomberg – Founder at Intellyx

Tune in to discover:

Discover the secret sauce to effectively balance security, development, and operations in the mobile app development lifecycle. This webinar is your gateway to unlocking the hidden potential of DevSecOps in your Mobile SDLC.

Unlock the Secret Sauce: Discover the perfect blend of security, development, and operations in mobile app development.

Dive into DevSecOps: This webinar unveils the hidden potential for your Mobile SDLC.

Master the Balance: Learn the key to effectively balancing security, development, and operations in mobile app development.

#MobileAppSecurity #AppSecurity #DevOps #Webinar #OnDemand #AppDefense #CyberThreats #AppDevelopment #DevSecOps ##SecurityIntegration #TechInsights #CybersecurityInsights #SecurityBestPractices #Intellyx #NowSecure #Appdome

Click here to watch the video on demand.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Update

Broadcom recently launched their new WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability, an AI Ops solution that normalizes and routes telemetry data to multiple dashboards, while providing contextual information and alerts for improving incident collaboration between DevOps teams, SREs and mainframe experts.

As modern mainframes take their place powering true hybrid cloud applications and serving repatriated workloads, total visibility and advance warning of anomalies becomes critical. Unfortunately, mainframes are usually black boxes to the leading observability solutions on the market. Without appropriate contextual understanding, the data signals flowing amongst LPARs seem indecipherable to tools that speak in RESTful terms and API calls.

The Broadcom WatchTower platform takes an open approach to surfacing mainframe signals within any observability tool, through the OpenTelemetry (or OTel) project, as well as previously contributed open source mainframe modernization tools like the Zowe open mainframe project.

Like any large enterprise vendor, Broadcom is, well, really broad in what it can cover. When evaluating any particular solution they offer, look at both the core competencies and the commitment of the firm toward innovation in that space.

In this case, you have a solid example of net-new development built atop the foundational mainframe bonafides from CA and the many other products and mainframe customers Broadcom supports, as well as their continuing commitment to open standards that could benefit users of any of the other major mainframe computing regimes dealing with hybrid cloud concerns.

Copyright ©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. At the time of writing, Broadcom is a former Intellyx subscriber. No AI was used to write this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article or event visit, email us at pr@intellyx.com.