Box believes content management is a crucial component of digital transformation projects, and to that end it has launched a new consulting service called Transform. The service provides customers who buy in with a dedicated and long-term consultant who will work with them on issues much broader than implementing Box software. Here's how Box describes Transform:
Integrating digital initiatives to accelerate organization-wide transformation: Box Transform provides enterprises with a strategic IT advisor to help them go beyond traditional file sharing practices, including implementing paperless strategies, digitizing time consuming processes like HR onboarding, building out custom applications with Box Platform, and retiring costly legacy infrastructure like network file shares.
Deploying agile methodologies: Projects through Box Transform are comprised of iterative sprints that include phases of planning, execution and retrospection, with the goal to increase efficiency and speed to results, resulting in processes being reimagined in months, not years.
Developing long term content strategies: With Box’s team of product and domain experts help you develop strategic and actionable content strategy roadmaps to centralize content layers and support ROI goals.
POV: Pricing wasn't disclosed for Transform services, which build upon the consulting practice Box formed in 2013. That was a telling development in Box's push toward enterprise business, and Transform represents the next natural step on that journey. The question is whether Box can make a compelling enough case to customers that Transform can truly deliver value outside the company's core domain expertise. Issues around identity management and compliance with respect to content are two areas where Box consultants could do so, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
Box, founded in 2005, does have the benefit of having helped thousands of customers move technology and processes to the cloud and has been steadily notching up more large enterprise deals, including with AstraZeneca and General Electric. Still, it's a crowded market for digital transformation consulting services and Box has its work cut out for it.
Gremlin targets cloud outages with chaos engineering: Outages are a fact of life in the cloud, and they're not only inconvenient but incredibly costly to both providers and customers who rely on their services. Now a startup just out of stealth called Gremlin wants to make outages a thing of the past—or at least dramatically infrequent—through a technique called chaos engineering.
It's led by Kolton Andrus, a former engineer at Amazon and Netflix, the latter of which is known for its use of chaos engineering. Netflix built a tool called Chaos Monkey that randomly takes parts of its production system offline to see how the rest of it responds, giving engineers insight into how to build more resiliency. Chaos Monkey is now part of a larger family of Netflix tools known as Simian Army.
Gremlin's tool acts in a similar manner; the company refers to it as an "engineering flu shot," wherein companies can "safely inject failure into systems in order to proactively identify and fix unknown faults."
The distributed systems found in cloud services are inherently problematic, Gremlin contends in its announcement:
Previously, software ran in a controlled, bare metal environment that introduced few variables, making it possible for engineering teams to identify potential risk and failures before they occurred. Within the last decade, systems have shifted to the cloud and become distributed with microservices and serverless methodologies, which introduced new dependencies on services outside of one’s control - creating complexity for any team of engineers to fully understand. This makes failure and outages inevitable.
Gremlin’s tool allows engineers to see how the system will behave in the face of failure, validates that defenses will work to prevent outages, minimizes the blast radius to allow for safe experimentation in production, and saves time and resources for engineering teams.
POV: Gremlin has raised a total of $8.75 million in seed and Series A funding, so it's certainly early days for the company in that respect. But it has already managed to sign up some high-profile early customers, including Expedia and Twilio. Gremlin has certainly taken inspiration from companies who understand massively scalable systems and its tool may quickly find a place in many enterprises' operations.
IBM launches Bot Asset Exchange: Big Blue is hoping to draw more chatbot developers to its Watson Conversation service through a new portal called the Bot Asset Exchange. Here are the key details from IBM's announcement:
The Bot Asset Exchange leverages open source development to help conversational interface developers, including bot, voicebot, IoT, and virtual reality developers easily discover, quickly configure, and simply deploy bots. Users can find domain-specific conversation logic ready for them to use, leverage the creativity of a community of bot builders to discover innovative ways others have built bots, or create and contribute their own bot conversation logic.
Using the platform tools and participating in the community is incentivized by a point system that offers rewards, recognition and prizes such as IBM-branded merchandise, tickets to IBM events like Index – San Francisco, one-on-one meetings with the Digital Business Group’s product team, and social media mentions.
POV: The portal is already stocked with a healthy number of industry-specific bots, with use cases including IT support, travel booking, online banking, equity trading, personal finance and property management. The bots are dependent on Watson Conversation for the back-end conversation processing but there are no restrictions on how they can be designed or where they can be published. The site is in its early stages but is well-designed; the challenge will be raising awareness, getting a critical mass of developers engaged, and ensuring good governance over the bot content.