Thesys CAT LLC, the Thesys Technologies subsidiary operating as the Plan Processor for the SEC's Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), announced today the appointment of Edward Watson as Chief Operating Officer and Shane Swanson as Chief Compliance Officer. 

Kik Interactive, the creator of popular chat platform Kik, today announced it is launching Kin, a cryptocurrency that will serve as a foundation for a decentralized ecosystem of digital services. 

Sberbank announces closing a transaction to purchase a controlling stake in DocDoc.ru, the leading company on the Russian e-medicine market.

From ChefConf 2017, Chef, the leader in Continuous Automation, today announced new capabilities to enable enterprises to transition to cloud-native and container-first environments with consistent automation and DevOps practices.

As enterprises navigate major technology shifts, demand is higher than ever for simple and consistent automation and management across hybrid infrastructure and application portfolios. Chef continues to invest in its platform to ensure successful business outcomes from digital transformation efforts amongst its customers.

Chef Automate, the company's flagship Continuous Automation Platform, is being extended with capabilities for:

• Compliance Automation. Chef Automate now integrates directly with InSpec to provide consistent workflows and practices for validating security requirements and compliance controls. Defining compliance as code enables security requirements to ‘shift left’ into DevOps processes, enabling teams to deliver software with increased speed, improved efficiency, and decreased risk.
• Application Automation. Chef also demonstrated the future of Chef Automate’s integration with Habitat to extend to enterprises the application supervisor capabilities required for deploying and managing any application from legacy monoliths to container-based, cloud-native, microservices, and everything in between.

InSpec, the company’s compliance automation framework, today released InSpec-AWS, InSpec-Azure, and InSpec-vSphere as incubation projects that bring compliance as code to the cloud. These projects provide resources to test, interact, and audit these cloud platforms directly and easily access their configuration inside of InSpec.

Habitat, the company’s emerging application supervisor technology, today released its highly anticipated Builder service for packaging, managing, and running apps. Habitat is focused on offering teams and enterprises the fastest and easiest way to package, build, and manage apps from bare metal through virtual and container runtimes. Habitat announced new productivity capabilities, including:

• Habitat Scaffolding. New helper functions in Habitat provide scaffolding to enable rapid packaging of apps built in with popular languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js with more to follow. Packaged apps can then be exported to any target runtime such as Docker and ACI for use in container environments such as Kubernetes, OpenShift and Mesosphere DC/OS.
• Enterprise-ready Habitat Plans. An initial set of 20 core build plans to enable developers and teams to more quickly package applications for common enterprise scenarios. These cover Big Data (Cassandra, Spark, Storm, Kafka, Zookeeper, CrateDB), Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), Middleware (WebSphere, Mulesoft, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Consul), Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Shield backup) and Developer and Content Tools (Jenkins, Drupal, Wordpress).
• Core Package Auto-Rebuilds. Packages accepted and curated as ‘Core’ will be automatically rebuilt as their dependencies are updated. Users can then consume these to power their own applications.

Partner Highlights:

Chef continues to act as the favored tooling for next generation technologies in the cloud. Chef has built a network of more than 400 partners worldwide including leading tech companies AWS, Microsoft, Google, HPE, Intel and IBM. The company attracted 198 new partners in 2016.

• AWS OpsWorks. Launched at AWS re:Invent in Q4 2016, OpsWorks for Chef Automate has offered customers the ability to launch Chef Automate natively from the AWS console in 15 minutes and provides the management of backup and upgrades allowing customers to focus on core configuration management and automation tasks. AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate saw 8x growth from January 2017 to March 2017. Chef Automate is also now available in the AWS Marketplace.
• Microsoft Azure. Microsoft and Chef worked together to provide a range of ways for their customer to manage their Azure infrastructure using Chef Automate. These include a new all in one Chef Automate in the Azure Marketplace as well as bringing Chef Automate to hybrid environments through Azure Stack Marketplace syndication. Earlier this year, at Build 2017, Chef launched a new set of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services integrations which provides a set of tasks to automate common build and release tasks when using Visual Studio Team Services alongside Chef Automate.
• VMware. Chef has expanded the integrations for VMware products by releasing new integrations between Chef and VMware vRealize 7 on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Leading systems integrators see business opportunity for automation of current- and next-generation customer architectures and firms such as Slalom, CTP, and others have made Chef their DevOps partner of choice.

Community Highlights:

Chef today launched a new community skills experience, Learn Chef Rally, providing comprehensive tutorials, articles, and technical documents with 51 modules across 11 tracks for the Chef and DevOps communities. Rally provides a gamified experience enabling users to measure and share their progress as they build their automation skills. The Rally experience prepares Chef users for formal training and certification in the high-demand market for DevOps practitioners.

Chef’s 70,000 strong community continues to contribute and support the projects, and each other. Chef has now been downloaded 40 million times. In the past year we’ve seen:

• More than 5,000 new Supermarket members, with over 5,000 cookbook releases to the Supermarket.
• More than 1,000 community-initiated pull requests merged into Chef projects.
• Our Slack communities have grown to more than 3,000 members across the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat projects.
• Chef participated in more than 300 public community events.

Company Momentum

Chef continues to see rapid business growth on a global scale. Some highlights include:

• Chef doubled new enterprise customers over the past two years, with total sales growing by nearly 50 percent in 2016.
• AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate, which was introduced in Q4 of 2016, saw 8x growth from January 2017 to March 2017.
• Chef is now used by more than half of the companies on the Fortune 50, and 5 of the top 10 US banks, 3 of the top 4 auto manufacturers, 6 of the top 10 US retailers, and 8 of the top 10 tech companies on the Fortune 500.
• Chef significantly expanded its international operations in the European and APAC markets and now serves over 150 customers in EMEA and over 50 in APAC.

Supporting Quotes:

“Applications are where all the value is to a business; both internally and with customers. As we strive to deliver more value faster, it’s natural that we move to an application-centric operating model. When we introduced Habitat a year ago, we started on the path of delivering that model to everyone. With the initial release of our build service, we’re showing how close we are to a world where a new security vulnerability triggers a fully automated response: we can rebuild your applications, we can patch your infrastructure, and we can validate that those changes can be safely and securely applied in production.” – Adam Jacob, co-founder and CTO, Chef

“In every industry vertical we are seeing enterprises use IT to become nimble digital attackers, significantly outperforming digital laggards. To compete effectively, enterprises should have a strategy for enabling increased speed, efficiency, while also reducing risk across their current environment that also provides a bridge to cloud-native and container-first strategies. Chef’s complete approach to Continuous Automation spanning infrastructure, compliance, and application automation helps simplify and provide consistency for software delivery regardless of the environment or shape of application.” – Ken Cheney, CMO, Chef

“Our community continues to grow and evolve at a rapid pace and we’re committed to making investments in its success. We have more open source projects than ever before and continue to see growth and adoption across those projects. ChefConf is always an amazing reunion where our community comes together to celebrate its accomplishments, share best practices, and plan for the future.” – Nathen Harvey, VP Community, Chef

What Our Customers Are Saying:

“In today’s software-driven economy, speed is the competitive currency required to meet digital consumer needs. At IHG, our technology helps differentiate our brand and enhance the guest experience. Chef Automate makes our infrastructure reliable and scalable, enabling our IT team to rapidly innovate and closely align with the strategic priorities of our business. The battle is no longer about large organizations outperforming the small; it’s about the fast beating the slow.” – Eric Pearson, CIO, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

“At Capital One, we are taking a cloud first approach to all new development, and are moving to a DevOps app development model that gives engineers more control over the software they create,” said Brock Beatty, Director, Technology, Capital One. “Chef has been a great partner in our DevOps and continuous automation journey, and ensuring our modern applications teams can build software with speed at scale in a well-managed way.”

What Our Partners Are Saying:

“Microsoft is continuing to evolve and build stronger ties and support for the open source communities. Chef has built an enterprise grade product around a best-of-breed open source, allowing customers to modernize their data centers and make the move to the cloud faster and more efficient.”  – John Gossman, Lead Architect, Microsoft Corp.

“Cloud adoption across an enterprise is a major undertaking, and our clients are seeking best of breed tools to help them through every step of their cloud journey,” said Rob Lancaster, Vice President, Global Alliances, Cloud Technology Partners, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “By incorporating Chef Automate in our Cloud Adoption Program, we are able to provide the prescriptive automation capabilities that our enterprise clients need to gain the full agility and speed the cloud promises.”

“Chef Automate is a great example of the next gen technology and tools needed to help break enterprise silos and provide a space for all technology practices to work together. Enterprises need the prescriptive guidance of Chef Automate. We are excited to see Chef continue to be the differentiator in this space.” – Waleed Bekheet, Global DevOps Practice Director from Slalom Consulting.

 Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, announced today that its clients Bangkok Bank and Gesa Credit Union were recognized for their innovative use of technology by Retail Banker International (RBI) at the Retail Banking Conference and Awards 2017. Thailand’s Bangkok Bank wonBest Mobile Banking Strategy for delivering ‘everyday, everywhere’ banking to its customers with Mobiliti Edge™ from Fiserv. Gesa Credit Union, located in Richland, Washington, won Retail Banking Security Innovation of the Year for pioneering the use of biometrics in their branches with Verifast™: Palm Authentication from Fiserv.

The Retail Banking Awards by RBI highlight the achievements of retail banking organizations throughout the past year. Award winners are highly regarded within the industry as top performers representing an exceptional level of achievement.

“These awards are a testament to the vision of Bangkok Bank and Gesa Credit Union, both of which are powerful examples of financial institutions that are using technology innovation to deliver experiences that fit seamlessly into people’s everyday lives,” said Andrew Steadman, vice president, Product Management and Marketing, International Group, Fiserv.

Further details of the winning entries include:

Best Mobile Banking Strategy Award – Winner, Bangkok Bank

With fast-growing smartphone adoption in Thailand and the rising demand from customers for on-the-go banking tools to complement their mobile lifestyles, Bangkok Bank has been continuWith Bualuang mBanking, which is built on the Mobiliti Edge mobile banking and payments platform from Fiserv, Bangkok Bank customers have the ability to access financial services via a mobile phone, tablet or the Apple Watch. Additionally, the bank added mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payments and advanced push notifications and alerts that can be received directly through the app.

Almost one year after launching the P2P service and other enhancements of the user experience, the average payment transaction volume per month increased by 350 percent and revenue increased by 300 percent.

Retail Banking Security Innovation of the Year – Winner, Gesa Credit Union

Gesa Credit Union piloted the use of Verifast: Palm Authentication, a fast, secure and convenient biometric authentication solution based on near-infrared scanning of an individual’s palm vein patterns. Gesa reduced the time to authenticate a member in the branch by 93 percent, speeding up the teller line while enhancing security and improving the customer experience. On a 1-to-5-point scale with 5 being the best, about 99.9 percent of Gesa members using the solution rated the palm vein technology a 5 on both the registration process and use.

In a world that is moving faster than ever before, Fiserv helps clients deliver solutions that are in step with the way people live and work today - financial services at the speed of life. Learn more at fiserv.com.

Cartwright, an actuarial and investment consultant for occupational pension schemes, has adopted RiskFirst’s PFaroe to model scheme assets and liabilities. This enables objectives to be better defined and achieved through clear and timely analysis of investment and contribution strategies. Daily tracking of asset switch triggers empowers schemes to quickly seize opportunities when they arise.

Sam Roberts, Head of Investment Consulting at Cartwright, says: “Our strength, expertise and deep experience is in helping each of our clients to better understand and prioritise their scheme’s investment objectives and risks, and then to implement an effective, practical investment strategy to achieve these objectives. By supporting our strength with specialists in their own related field – such as the creation of models and the development of analytics – this creates a virtuous circle which allows us to focus even more on our clients and their strategies, whilst ensuring holistic, best-in-class solutions are available to all our clients, no matter what their size. When it comes to analytics and user-friendly technology, it is clear that RiskFirst are the industry leaders.”

Cartwright switched to PFaroe due to its ability to provide additional features such as real-time funding level monitoring and tracking of trigger levels, as well as its intuitive and user-friendly interface.  

Matthew Seymour, CEO, RiskFirst, comments: “We are delighted to see the continued trend of forward-looking consultancies, such as Cartwright, leveraging PFaroe to allow them to focus on the elements of their work that are truly most valuable to clients — namely, providing advice and solutions — rather than developing models and number crunching. We continue to make PFaroe increasingly flexible, allowing consultancies and investment managers to clearly articulate the benefits of their advice and products in ways unique to them.” 

As the Virtual Reality (VR) race heats up, research by Worldpay, a global leader in payments, has revealed the UK is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to mass market acceptance of the technology.

According to the research, a mere 5% of UK shoppers surveyed have used VR technology in a retail setting, and just 35% of respondents would even consider buying a product using a VR or Augmented Reality (AR) device. These figures expose Britain as behind the curve when it comes to VR adoption, with surveyed consumers in Brazil and China more than twice as likely to shop within a VR world as UK-based shoppers.

The cost of VR technology is one of the biggest barriers to adoption for two-thirds of those surveyed. However, security is also a key issue, with 43% of consumers concerned with the level of security offered within a virtual environment.

Nevertheless, nearly one-third of Brits believe that VR is the future of shopping, and 58% of respondents expressed interest in the broader used of the technology in retail, for example trying on an item of clothing in a virtual store. Confident that VR will live up to the hype, 40% of respondents believe that VR technology will become as popular as smartphones.

Commenting on the findings, Nick Telford-Reed, Director of Technology Innovation at Worldpay said: “Although consumer appetite for VR is growing, there is a long way to go before the technology enters the mainstream in the UK. Consumers are sceptical of the technology, particularly when it comes to storing sensitive information, such as payment details, within a virtual world. The security concerns highlighted by our research are nothing new. It’s not that long since many were wary of shopping online or using mobile banking. What is needed is education on a global scale to stress that it can be possible to shop securely in a virtual world.”

To help overcome the perceived security barrier, researchers at Worldpay are investigating how shoppers can pay using a credit or debit card while remaining immersed within a virtual environment. The global payments processer has created a proof of concept, which provides the same levels of convenience, and security that shoppers have in-store and online, without needing to leave the virtual world.

Developed in conjunction with production company INITION, the prototype design uses Host Card Emulation (HCE) to virtualise the purchasing process. The payment process uses EMV* technology. For payments under £30, the prototype works in the same way a contactless payment does – with a tap of the (virtual) card across a (virtual) card machine. For purchases over £30, Worldpay has created a technology called AirPIN. This first of its kind allows the consumer to see a range of numbers whilst immersed in the virtual world, and then collect the four numbers that make up their PIN, one by one, using their virtual controller.

Commenting on the proof of concept, Telford-Reed added: “Innovation is what drives us and our clients. As technology moves on, so do the needs of consumers. As a leading payments company, it is our responsibility to consider where the next generation of payments will need to take place. We have built this prototype to provide a seamless, secure payment option for consumers in a virtual world. The benefits for merchants experimenting with virtual and augmented reality could be significant. While it is very early stages in its development, we believe that the sky is the limit when it comes to the industries that will find this technology useful. As more companies experiment with VR/AR in their endeavor to drive higher customer engagement, they need to consider if VR technology can support purchases as well. Whatever sales channel, it’s vital to make the payment process both slick and secure for customers. A compelling, immersive and seamless VR experience may even have the capability to increase sales.”

* EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, and is a global standard for credit and debit cards that uses computer chips to authenticate (and secure) chip card transactions.

RPMI Railpen (Railpen) has selected and implemented Opus Nebula’s Reporting as a Service solution for its client investment reports. The Reporting as a Service® solution replaces a legacy reporting system and Railpen’s clients will now benefit from richer report content and shorter delivery times. The solution was delivered on time and within the original project budget.

Railpen was advised in late 2015 that their existing reporting solution was being withdrawn at the end of 2016. They had to select, implement, test and launch a new reporting solution within a year. If that wasn’t challenging enough they also wanted to review and improve the report content.Following a robust selection process, including a proof of concept, contracts were signed with Opus Nebula in July 2016. 

For the remainder of the year as data feeds evolved from Railpen to feed the new format of a report, the capabilities of the new pack evolved iteratively with regular demonstration and review. Speed and ease of on-boarding are proven characteristics of Opus Nebula’s Reporting as a Service® offering, which enables significantly faster, more cost-effective deployment than is possible with traditional client reporting system implementations.

Geoff Smith, IT Programme Manager at Railpen, commented: “The speed and ease that Opus Nebula were able to on-board Railpen to their Reporting as a Service® solution was very impressive. Implementation of a traditional buy and build model would simply not have been possible in the timeframe. However, despite being fast to deploy, there is no compromise on report flexibility and quality. Throughout the project Opus Nebula’s ongoing support and responsiveness was a significant factor in helping us to meet our deadlines. Opus Nebula has enabled Railpen to fully automate the reporting processes leading to significant improvement in the consistency and quality of reports, while simultaneously reducing process risk. We are now able to deliver a superior level of service to our clients with greater cost efficiency.”

 Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, today extended its cloud choice commitment by giving clients even more freedom to deploy Pega solutions on their preferred cloud provider with no vendor lock-in. To support this initiative, Pega has teamed up with Pivotal®, the company accelerating enterprise digital transformation, to deliver Pegasoftware on Pivotal Cloud Foundry®. This marks the first in a series of planned partnerships with leading cloud providers that will bring Pega clients unmatched choice, flexibility, and support to configure their cloud environment to best suit their needs.

While business needs change rapidly and unpredictably, many software vendors restrict their customers to a single cloud deployment option that forces vendor lock-in. By collaborating with Pivotal, Pega offers a more flexible approach with a supported alternative to Pega® Cloud – Pega’s fully managed cloud platform optimized for Pega software. Pega clients can run Pega software on their cloud of choice, move seamlessly between cloud infrastructures as their business needs and drivers change, and get optimal value out of their cloud investment.

Pivotal works with more than a third of the Fortune 100 and a rapidly growing portion of the Fortune 2000 due to Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s ability to deploy and operate cloud-native and legacy applications on any public cloud or on-premise. This collaboration comes in response to increasing demand from Pega and Pivotal customers to provide a joint solution that combines the power of these industry-leading platforms.

Pega will provide clients with a Pivotal tile enabling them to quickly and easily deploy Pega solutions on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. This Pivotal deployment package – Pega for Pivotal Cloud Foundry – will be free for licensed Pega customers and available for download on the Pega Exchange marketplace starting in early June.

With cloud choice, Pega customers are able to run Pega Platform and Pega customer engagement applications in supported cloud environments, including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with access to 24/7 Pega customer support. Pega also continues to support configurations in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. For more information on Pega Cloud and its support for cloud choice, please visit www.pega.com/products/cloud

Quotes & Commentary:

“For many software providers, the only cloud path they typically offer customers is their own – leading to vendor lock-in at a time when agility is paramount,” said Tim Beachus, vice president, cloud business and strategy, Pegasystems. “Pega enables its clients to blaze their own trail. We’ve built Pega Cloud to be the optimal environment to run our software, but as our clients’ needs evolve, they enjoy the freedom to deploy on platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry to meet their business goals.”

“Our work with Pega will bring two of the most advanced technology platforms together to enable tremendous operational efficiency for some of the most important businesses in the world,” said Joshua McKenty, ‎vice president, global ecosystem engineering, Pivotal.