Take yourself a coffee or tea and enjoy the full testimonial Galenica’s data security standards with Delphix (four minutes read).

What wonderful words are praising the successful effort and achievements of the dbi services team – and every bit is well deserved!

What are the key factors to a project success?

For me, the major takeaway from this project – and from the overwhelmingly positive testimonial – is the following. (I admit, it’s not groundbreaking, but always good as a reminder.)
Because the key questions are: Why do some projects fail and others succeed? What are the key factors of a successful project?
I firmly believe that it is a combination of the following “ingredients” that lift teams from average to excellence project achievers:

• dedication
• curiosity
• creative problem-solving approach
• flexibility in an environment of changing goals and requirements
• in-depth technical expertise (yes, still needed, even in the times of AI…)
• willingness and ability to cooperate across team boundaries
• willingness and ability to listen and ask questions
• not to be discouraged by obstacles of any kind
• allow time for a good laugh

If all these requirements are met, the success of the project is not yet guaranteed – but it is very, very likely!

L’article Mastering complex data security challenges leads to praise and honor est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Some weeks ago, one of our long-standing clients issued a tender to find suppliers to support upcoming projects in numerous areas and technologies. Due to the wide range of expertise available at dbi services, we decided to participate in no less than eight of these lots.

As I am the sales manager responsible for this customer, I was tasked with responding to this tender. Anyone who has ever taken part in a public tender knows that you better block a whole lot of time in your calendar. Because you have to obtain all register extracts, certificates, signatures, sign-offs and stamps, CVs, reference use cases and last but not least, you have to get the official approval to provide external reference information.

Doing it alone would have been a nightmare and the result would have been… let’s say… mediocre at best.

But luckily, I am surrounded by a large number of colleagues who can and want to help me. Fortunately I can rely on countless experts in their fields. So it’s high time to celebrate this impressive team effort that helped me „get shit done“:
For speedy and accurate translations and marketing support, a huge „thank you“ goes out to Tanguy and Florence! For helping me keep keep track of accounting issues, thanks a heap, Bettina! For the deep dive into HR details, I bow to you, Magali! For management feedback and back-up, many thanks to David, Grégory and Yann. For technical expertise on Linux (Misa, I am impressed!), PostgreSQL (Daniel is my man!), OMrun, Test-Automation and RPA (Frank & Oli, you are the ones I am counting on!), Kubernetes and Ansible (Chay, Emmanuel, Kevin, what would I do without you?). For managing the delivery capabilities and the overall technical picture, I can‘t thank you enough Julia, Arnaud, Gérard, Alain, Christophe & Stéphane. For the sales support and challenging my approach, thanks a lot Martin, Yann, Pierre-Yves, Christoph. For the varied and valuable administrative and organizational support, thanks to Sabine, Aline, Jénia, Justine. For insights into our consulting capacities and expertise in various areas, I put my hands together for Alain, Jean-Philippe, Andreas, Karsten, Nicolas.

Loosely based on a well-known African proverb, I would like to conclude as follows: „To write a document, one person is enough. But to take part in a tender it takes a whole village.”

L’article It takes a whole village to… est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

• Innovative plug-in to generate test data objects derived from the database schema to run a 1:1 compare on the whole database content.
  –> Imagine migrating for example from Oracle to PostgreSQL and being able to compare the complete database content on the push of a button? Check!
• The new “query only” functionality allows you to execute a simple query test data object without the comparison.
  –> Comparing data is great and what we like most and do best! But sometimes you just want to stage the data and perform alternative actions with it. Consider it done!
• New look and feel including better result visibility and the possibility to switch to the stylish “dark mode”
  –> We certainly care most about content and functionality and performance. But hey, who doesn’t want to have a nice tool to work with?

To explore the functionality and power of the OMrun framework on your own, feel free to dive into the OMrun online manual to get a feel for its capabilities.
If you are a user already, you will get the new OMrun 5.0 for free according your license agreement.
And if your are not a customer yet but interested to try it out: Just leave me a note – and get excited…

L’article OMrun 5.0 is ready – there are many reasons to get excited! est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Imagine a meeting room (pick the one without windows…) with +25 application managers lined up around one big table. One after the other, they would report the status of their project with focus on the next MDP. And as you can imagine, the projects were always on “green”, especially when the date of the MDP was still far away in the future.

But the closer the MDP date came, the more difficult it would be for application managers to “hide” their challenges in delivering their tasks in time and quality. Since there were so many interfaces between all the applications, the fellow delivery managers had quite a good overview about who might be in trouble delivering and who won’t.

For quite some time, Frank himself was part of this meeting and observed it with a mixture of joy and frustration. Joy, because it was kind of funny to see the project leaders stammering around while trying to explain their difficult project status and still being able to report “green”. And frustration because these meetings were long and tiring and reminded one sometimes more of a theatric experience than of a serious business meeting. But most of all: These meetings were inefficient and extremely expensive if you imagine that +25 senior delivery managers were sitting in one room for +3h every few weeks.

Frank was always fascinated by the possibilities of data driven decision making and it was no surprise that he took his chance to think a little further. And after some reasoning, a business idea came to his mind: Why do we need to rely to the assessment, wordy declarations and “opinions” of application managers when all the evidence is right there in the data?! Because the statement, whether or not an interface is working or whether or not an application is doing what it should be doing can be derived directly from the data.
So how about using data as an early detection system? Shouldn’t it be possible to create a tool to automate this process? You would need a tool, Frank reasoned, that is able to at least:

• compare data based on rules
• cope with different data formats
• measure and display the rule violations for simple further assessment

This was the starting point and there was no stopping Frank in developing an instrument that would later evolve into the powerful framework OMrun. So thanks to a rather inefficient and tiring series of meetings, the world can now use a highly configurable standard framework not only to measure data quality in heterogeneous system environments but also to perform data migrations or anonymize data.

The rest is history – and still evolving!

L’article A brief history of data quality or – the birth of OMrun. Part 2: Turning frustration into solution est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

At this time, senior consultant and CIO Frank Zeindler was engaged in a mandate for a major Swiss bank. Frank was a project leader and responsible for the further development of an application in the credit and loan department.

In large organizations, the process to deploy new software is a rather complex task. And major Swiss banks – certainly in the years 2000 – are very large organizations.
To illustrate this fact, quickly imagine yourself the “application landscape” of that bank. The application landscape was a display of the application architecture showing all applications and interfaces involved to run the bank. This application landscape also existed as a print-out-version. As such, it was a piece of paper with the approximate dimensions of 1m x 2m and the descriptions of the “boxes” and “arrows” were in font size 6. To sum it up: A significant number of applications and interfaces are needed to run a major bank…

The release of new software or new interfaces within the application architecture was performed in so called MDP’s (major deployment packages). At this time, such change of releases was planned three times a year. You may say that this is not exactly what you would call CI/CD – but that’s just how it was at this time…

To coordinate and manage and orchestrate such MDPs, a highly skilled, tough and well-informed person from management level was needed. That person – let’s call him Mr. Smith – would run the MDP meetings in a military kind of style in order to manage this “flea circus” of dependencies, priorities, special requests, regulatory requirements and business needs.

The MDP status meetings were somehow feared amongst the involved application managers, because nobody wanted to be the target of Mr. Smith’s critical questions and nobody wanted to be the person to endanger the MDP because he or she could not deliver his or her application until the defined deadline.

To read Part 2 of “A brief history of data quality or – the birth of OMrun”, click here.

L’article A brief history of data quality or – the birth of OMrun. Part 1: Complexity is only the first name est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Stronger Together!

Representing dbi services at the Partner Conference in Prague was a great opportunity for us as a Red Hat Advanced Partner.

About 850 people attended this amusing event! Interactions with the Red Hat Community were very interesting and relaxed. Is it because of the Open Source atmosphere? The organization, catering, and location were great also! Many thanks to the organizers !

Also a sincere thank you to all Swiss Red Hat and Tech Data contacts at the event for welcoming and assisting Swiss Partners during the 3 days. Everything went extremely professional thanks to Leonard Bodmer (Country Manager Red Hat Switzerland), Richard Zobrist (Head of Partner & Alliances Red Hat), Maja Zurovec (Account Manager Partner & Alliances Red Hat), Sandra Maria Sigrist (Tech Data), and Daria Stempkowski (Tech Data). Many thanks to all of you, also for the warm and relaxed evening at Villa Richter at the foot of Prague’s castle !

We are Stronger Together!

All about automation, integration, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud

With this 3 days Partner Conference, Red Hat proposed a bride agenda of Breakouts, Exams, Hackathon, Keynotes, Labs, and an Open Innovation Lab. I mostly attended sessions where Red Hat partners and customers had the opportunity to give feedbacks on their experience with Red Hat products. Some of the sessions and keynotes were remarkable.

Red Hat Middleware Roadmap

The “Red Hat Middleware Roadmap” sessions (Part 1 & 2) with Rich Sharpels were a good opportunity to learn more about productivity (automation, integration, runtimes), reliability (security, reduced complexity), and flexibility (containers for scaling, cloud, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud) with OpenShift. With these 2 presentations you also got informed on the iPaaS which is a new private integration Platform-as-a-Service offering to provide cloud-based services for application integration and messaging. The goal is here to strengthen collaboration within the business teams (devOps) thanks to Managed Integration + OpenShift Dedicated. Rich Sharpels summarizes the benefits of the iPaaS with: “cloud services and packages where customers don’t have to administrate anything!”

Ansible Partner Enablement Offerings

Günter Herold from Red Hat and Daniel Knözinger from Open Networks Austria held the session “Ansible Partner Enablement Offerings”. This session was focusing on advantages of automating tasks with Ansible for reducing mistakes, errors, and complexity because “Ansible is the universal language for the whole IT team”. With Ansible, “start small and develop” .

Best Practices for Working with Red Hat Support

Who wanted to get informed on “Best Practices for Working with Red Hat Support” attended the session with Caroline Baillargeon, Leona Meeks, and Peter Jakobs from Red Hat. This presentation gave the opportunity to learn and discuss on:

• The Customer Portal which is said to be “full of information and best practices that could be useful before opening and escalating issues”. For example, should you search for information on Ansible, have a look at this page
• The TSAnet Connect where answers for multi IT solutions are centralized
• The Case Management Tool for sharing the open source spirit and to be part of the community (example)
• Tips to work efficiently with the Red Hat support:
  1. “Make sure the customer is registered on the correct time zone”
  2. “To get 7×24 support, a Premium Support subscription is needed”
  3. “in case the answer on an issue is not appropriate, use the escalation button”
  4. “contact Red Hat to get access to the trainings that also the Red Hat engineers follow for technical problem solving”

While keeping the end customer’s satisfaction in mind, this session could probably be best summarized with “why not contributing and sharing knowledge within the Red Hat community ?”

Keynotes

Keynotes mainly concentrated on “marketing topics” that aim at boosting partner engagement, but still interesting, in particular:

• “The Killer App in digital transformation is human connection” with Margaret Dawson on collaborating within the community
• “Open Hybrid Cloud Ecosystems: Bold Goals for Tomorrow” with Lars Herrmann on innovations that have been considered impossible. In short, “if you think it is impossible, just do it”, so develop cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud opportunities…

On Red Hat’s and Partner’s booths at the Congress Center

Besides sessions and presentations, lots of interesting technical booths at the Congress Center Prague did promote the work of the Red Hat engineers within the Open Source community. In particular I spent some time with Romain Pelisse (Red Hat Berlin) and Robert Zahradnícek (Red Hat Brno) to let me explain how they work and what are the trends in their areas. Of course we did speak about automation and integration, and about findings that are developed within the open source community first, before getting implemented in Red Hat solutions.

Last but not least, some Red Hat partners were present with a booth to promote their activities and products during the conference, among which Tech Data and Arrows ECS which are well know at dbi services.

What to take from the Red Hat EMEA Conference?

On Red Hat and the Conference

At the end of the day, the keywords from the Red Hat EMEA Conference were probably not that far from the keywords you would get from other technology conferences. Concepts and products like “automation”, “integration”, “Ansible”, or “OpenShift” are means to get companies into the cloud. But why not? The trend into the cloud is getting more and more clear as it now makes sense for lots of projects at least for Disaster Recovery, Test and Development in the cloud.

If private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud is not the topic at Red Hat. Their solutions are agnostic. And Red Hat’s strategy is clearly based on a strong commitment to open source. It’s all about “products” (not projects), “collaboration”, “community”, and “customer success”.

On Open Source trends and strategy

Now you may ask why subscribing to Red Hat’s products and support? Sure, with Ansible and other Open Source products you can easily “start small and develop”. Therefore the community version may fit. But what if you go in production? The more and the bigger the projects will become, the more you will need support. And to subscribe will probably make sense.

Then don’t forget that Open Source is not for free. That you go for community or enterprise Open Source makes no difference, at the end you will need to invest at least in time and knowledge. And, depending on the situation, you may subscribe in products and support. If you don’t know where to start, ask dbi services for Open Source expertise.

Looking forward to reading your comments.

L’article Feedback on the EMEA Red Hat Partner Conference 2019 in Prague est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.