Qwary is excited to announce the release of four incredible new features: In-Product Surveys, Prototype Testing, Session Recording, and Heatmaps. These game-changing additions are designed to elevate your customer's experiences, eliminate bugs, and improve your product by gaining direct insights from your customers.

 In-Product Surveys: Real-Time Customer Feedback

In-product surveys are a seamless and effortless way for customers to share their feedback. Get real-time insights on satisfaction, feature usability, and pain points directly within the product interface. Instead of implementing user-targeting survey tools via text or email, integrate survey tools directly into your customer's user experiences.

These surveys are easily embedded into your app or software, allowing you to collect feedback as users interact with your product. Customers won't need to navigate away from the product to provide feedback. You will experience higher completion rates as customers are more likely to complete a survey while using a product rather than return to a survey days after.

By leveraging in-product testing, you tailor your product development to your customers' needs. Integrated surveys provide more accurate data as users will be your target audience. The feedback will be specific to your business goals, elevating your SaaS offerings to new heights. More than improving your product, feedback from these surveys can let you know what your customers prioritize and which features are important to them. They may also uncover bugs or issues early in the product's launch that your product teams missed! This can help you deliver more reliable products in the future.

Prototype Testing: Maximize Product Success

Combine in-product surveys with prototype testing to improve your product early on its development cycle. You'll get valuable feedback in the early stages so you can deliver products that not only align with your customer's needs but ensure their satisfaction and loyalty.

Prototype testing is a collaborative way to bring your products to market. By listening to your target audience early on, your product teams can eliminate features that don't resonate with customers. Getting input from your customers can be a great way to refine your products, too. Your teams also have the opportunity to see your products tested in real-world scenarios. This can help point out areas that need improvement. Carry out your prototype testing across a variety of devices as well so that customers get a seamless experience, whether it's on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a mobile phone.

It's a game-changer for businesses for various reasons. You can minimize your development costs by identifying bugs early on and boosting customer satisfaction by providing a product that meets your target audience's needs. And by integrating feedback, you'll deliver a high-quality product.

Session Recording: Illuminate the Customer Journey

Get more in-depth visibility into your customer's interactions and behaviors when they use your product. Session recording lets you record and playback your customer's interactions as they use your software or apps. This can offer a wealth of information when your product teams make improvements or decisions on your company's products.

One of the key advantages of recording sessions is seeing how customers interact with your products. The survey tool offers a comprehensive view of how your target audience behaves: what buttons they push, what features they ignore, and their preferences.

Session recording lets you categorize your customers into user groups to refine your product further. Playbacks also allow you to hone in on any errors or usability issues customers face. You can replay recorded sessions to address the problem areas and implement immediate solutions.

These sessions provide opportunities to experiment with A/B testing as well. By having session recordings of a control group and a test group, this SaaS tool can help you optimize your products like never before.

In the event of a security breach, these recordings can help with investigations and audits. They can also serve as an accurate historical record.

Heatmaps: Refine Your Product

Like session recordings, heatmaps offer visual roadmaps of how customers interact with your products. These visual surveys are unique because you can see what customers overlook and what they gravitate toward while using your product. This visual data can then be used when making decisions to add or eliminate features, for example.

Heatmaps also provide opportunities to experiment with new features and updates. You can visually see what customers click on, how they scroll, and what buttons they ignore. Need to identify where your "hotspots" are? Using a SaaS survey tool like Heatmaps gives you direct insight. Conversely, you'll also get to see where your "coldspots" are and what features you could quickly eliminate.

To further refine your products, use heatmaps for "click tracking." What are your users clicking on most, and why? You can glean essential behavior patterns, too. Do users read all the text, or are they skipping sections? What sections are they skipping? These patterns are important to identify as your team can then efficiently optimize products based on the behavior patterns of your test audience. These kinds of visual guides allow you to leverage customer feedback to drive organic, product-led growth.

Heatmaps are also an ideal tool to test various devices and screen sizes. Some users may have a better experience on a laptop as opposed to a mobile device, for instance. This data can help your team make strategic decisions when improving mobile experiences, thus creating exceptional product experiences that your customers will love.

Edgeworx, an edge computing company and Google Cloud Partner, is pleased to release Edgeworx Cloud, an enterprise-focused edge native platform on the Google Cloud Marketplace. Co-founded by Kilton Hopkins, an edge computing and computer vision AI veteran, Edgeworx has set the bar for scalable edge architecture, with simplicity and security.

Edgeworx Cloud provides an enterprise-grade foundational edge platform without customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, complicated networking, or custom infrastructure. A secured and decoupled data plane carries all data from device-to-device, microservice-to-microservice, and host-to-client over on-demand private internets obfuscating traffic to everyone, including Edgeworx. The lightweight and hardware agnostic agent unifies heterogeneous fleets, which otherwise require specialized and disjointed effort to maintain. Edge deployments and devices can be rolled out and directly managed from any network, no VPN or tunneling required, minimizing effort for developers to remotely orchestrate nodes.

Companies require remote orchestration, localized processing, and more efficient data upstreaming, yet they frequently invest years of time and capital to achieve these goals. Edgeworx Cloud solves that problem. Edgeworx Cloud streamlines operations and cuts costs, allowing businesses to focus on innovation and growth without being burdened with edge computing architecting and implementation. ROI is no longer DOA by having to pay for R&D, maintenance, or extended employee training on atypical architectures.

"Edgeworx made our edge node configuration and management easy and allowed us to focus our efforts on developing the software necessary to run our lab operations, rather than just focusing on managing our edge nodes!" - Erin Lewis, Senior Software Engineer, Robotics Integrations, Strateos

Unlike other cloud products, Edgeworx Cloud keeps data away from itself and lets users truly own and delegate where their information belongs, whether it is on-site, in Google Cloud, or any other major cloud provider.

Bloomberg Enterprise Data content and Data License Plus are now integrated with BigQuery, enabling customers to easily bring comprehensive datasets to their analytics workloads

Bloomberg today announced a new offering that enables customers of Google Cloud to accelerate their data strategies through the integration of Bloomberg's cloud-based data management solution, Data License Plus (DL+), with BigQuery, Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse.

With access to Bloomberg's extensive experience managing, modeling, and delivering vast quantities of complex content, mutual customers can now receive their Bloomberg Data License (DL) data fully modeled and combined directly in BigQuery. This allows organizations to use Google Cloud's advanced analytics capabilities to quickly and efficiently extract more value from critical business information with minimal data wrangling.

"As capital markets firms continue their journeys to migrate workloads to the Cloud, our customers need to access high quality data efficiently and in the environment of their choice," said Don Huff, Global Head of Client Services and Operations at Bloomberg Data Management Services at Bloomberg at Bloomberg. "We're excited to expand our collaboration with Google Cloud, remaining at the forefront of innovation in financial data management and further expanding our customers' enterprise analytics capabilities."

"Google Cloud and Bloomberg have a shared commitment to enabling customers making data-driven decisions to power their business," said Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, ISVs, and Marketplace at Google Cloud. "Our expanded alliance will enable customers to seamlessly use Bloomberg's leading datasets alongside their own data within BigQuery, making it easy to perform analytics with intelligence about financial markets, regulations, ESG, and other business-critical information."

Through this expanded collaboration, customers can utilize the leading analytics capabilities of BigQuery and the expansive collection of datasets available via Bloomberg Data License to power their largest, most critical workloads. Bloomberg's Data License content includes reference, pricing, regulatory, ESG, fundamentals, estimates, and historical data for operational, quant and investment research workflows. It covers more than 70 million securities and 40,000 data fields.

Specific benefits include:

• Access to Bloomberg data directly in BigQuery: Bloomberg customers can now seamlessly access Bloomberg Data License content within BigQuery for scalable use throughout their enterprise, accelerating time-to-value from analytics projects by eliminating the time-consuming process of ingesting and structuring third-party datasets.
• Eliminated data barriers: Bloomberg and Google Cloud will make Bloomberg's DL+ solution available to mutual customers via BigQuery, allowing for the delivery of fully modeled Bloomberg data and multi-vendor ESG content that is accessible within their analytics workloads.

Bloomberg recently announced that Mackenzie Investments has selected DL+ ESG Manager to host the acquisition, management and publishing of multi-vendor ESG data, positioning the firm to implement ESG investing approaches more efficiently and develop more sophisticated ESG-focused insights and investment products. Mackenzie Investments will use BigQuery to power these analytics workloads moving forward.

46% of container organizations now run serverless containers, up from 31% two years ago

Datadog, Inc., the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, today unveiled the findings of its fifth annual report, 10 Insights on Real-World Container Use. To understand the state of the container ecosystem, Datadog examined data from more than 2.4 billion containers run by tens of thousands of customers.

Datadog's report found that serverless containers continue to rise in popularity—46% of container organizations now run serverless containers, up from 31% two years ago—as teams look to improve developer productivity.

Other key findings from the report include:

• The adoption of Arm processor-based compute for containerized workloads has more than doubled over the past year.
• Sizing workloads remains a challenge for organizations as more than 65% of Kubernetes workloads are utilizing less than half of their requested CPU and memory.
• Usage of GPU-based compute on containerized workloads—which is used to efficiently train machine learnings and large language models (LLMs), perform inferences and process large datasets— has increased 58% year-over-year.

"We are continuing to see organizations move to serverless containers for the benefits of improving productivity and agility while reducing operational overhead and cloud costs," said Yrieix Garnier, VP of Product at Datadog. "With the serverless approach, organizations don't have to provision or manage the infrastructure needed to run, maintain and scale the containers. This strategy also comes with cost benefits as cloud providers manage the serverless containers and therefore can optimize resource utilization and cloud spend."

Four Inc. has been named a federal aggregator for Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics. Under the agreement, Four Inc. will provide Dun & Bradstreet solutions to the public sector through Four Inc.'s NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWPV), Information Technology Enterprise Solutions- Software 2 (ITES-SW2) contract, and its network of channel partners as part of Four Inc.'s boutique aggregation program. This collaboration brings together the expertise and capabilities of both organizations to deliver innovative data solutions tailored specifically for government agencies.

As a global leader in business decisioning data and analytics, Dun & Bradstreet equips government organizations with tools to make mission-critical decisions, mitigate risks, and undertake compliance processes efficiently. Among Dun & Bradstreet's solutions included in the agreement are D&B Investigate™, D&B Protect™ and D&B Fortify™, which provide a broad range of data and analytics through a single sign-on platform that leverages the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud containing more than 500 million total organizations, AI-driven technology, and business decisioning data and analytics. The platform enables government agencies to address complex challenges, optimize operations, and enhance citizen services by delivering deep business insights and enabling timely decision-making inside complex business environments.

Dun & Bradstreet's extensive experience in data and analytics, combined with Four Inc.'s comprehensive understanding of the government sector's unique challenges, creates a powerful synergy that will transform the way government agencies leverage data.

"We are excited about the strategic agreement with Dun & Bradstreet," said Chris Wilkinson, EVP of Sales at Four Inc. "By leveraging Dun & Bradstreet's robust data and analytics, our government clients can access insights and make informed decisions that lead to enhanced service delivery and better overall outcomes for the public."

Xoriant, (a ChrysCapital company), a Sunnyvale headquartered prominent digital engineering services company today announced it has achieved Select tier partner status from Snowflake, the Data Cloud company. As a Select partner, Xoriant can accelerate the digital transformation of its joint customers who can fully leverage the performance, flexibility, and near-infinite scalability of the Snowflake Data Cloud.

"Data is core to every modern enterprise. The partnership with Snowflake reflects our commitment to collaborate with Snowflake and the global community. We continue to explore new opportunities, build innovative technology solutions that help customers realize new revenue streams from their data investments and drive their business forward," said  Navneet Taneja, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Alliances & Partnerships, Xoriant.

Xoriant's team of skilled, experienced, Snowflake-certified engineers will continue collaborating closely to mobilize the world's data with Snowflake's Data Cloud, helping joint customers realize maximum value from their data and optimize the data stored in the cloud. As a Select tier partner, Xoriant will continue to deliver seamless complex migration, tech stack modernization, re-engineer enterprise data platforms, and ensure process and cost optimization for the global Snowflake community, including ISVs and enterprise customers.

"Xoriant's product engineering expertise combined with Snowflake's Data Cloud comprise a powerful combination of capabilities to streamline the data management and transformation for joint customers and support our mission to mobilize data in the service of the enterprise," said Katie Ecklund, Senior Director of Partner Sales - America, at Snowflake.

The Snowflake Partner Network unlocks the potential of the Data Cloud with a broad array of tools and partners. Partnerships and integrations enable customers to leverage Snowflake's flexibility, performance, and ease of use to deliver more meaningful data insights.

This combination creates a broad portfolio of industry-focused offerings, strengthens SAP® expertise and professional services talent, expands global reach and number of regional resources.

Syntax Systems , a global leader in technological solutions and services for implementing and managing cloud applications, and Montreal-based Solutions Beyond Technologies  today announced the successful conclusion of the acquisition. With this transaction, announced on October 3, 2023, Beyond – a professional services firm specializing in the integration of SAP® solutions and the optimization of business performance – joins the Syntax family.

The combination of Syntax and Beyond will create a team of more than 2,800 experts serving more than 900 clients in the mid-sized and large enterprise market globally, with 26 business locations located in the Americas, Europe , in Africa and Asia.  

“Bringing together the Syntax and Beyond teams is directly aligned with our strategy of providing industry-focused expertise. We see a great opportunity to create even more value for our customers through our combined expertise in manufacturing, natural resources, construction, retail, consumer products, life sciences and the public sector,” says Christian Primeau , Global CEO of Syntax. “Our respective partnerships with SAP, our corporate cultures and our shared values ​​will allow us to act quickly as a global team and thus quickly benefit from synergies in order to accelerate the growth of the new group. » Mr. Primeau will continue to lead Syntax as Global CEO.

“As a technology leader, you must continually ask yourself how to best serve customers' interests now and in the future,” says Luc Dubois , Partner and CEO at Solutions Beyond Technologies. “Being part of the Syntax family gives us this path for the future by increasing our geographic reach, our consulting services practice, and our solution offering in areas such as security, data and IoT. With Syntax as a partner, we have the advantage of retaining our nature as a boutique firm, but with the resources to deliver on a larger scale. »

Combined value of Syntax and Solutions Beyond Technologies 

• Industry-Focused Solutions:  Specializing in the mid to large enterprise market, including manufacturing, construction, natural resources, retail, consumer products, life sciences and the public sector. This specialization will continue to allow Beyond and Syntax to help their clients navigate the complexities these industries face every day. 
• International Practice and Local Commitment:  Together, Syntax and Beyond will have a global footprint that serves clients in 26 locations across the Americas, Europe , Africa and Asia. Joining these forces means clients will benefit from a flexible, international team serving local markets. 
• Business Transformation Consulting Services:  This combination leverages existing expertise in the SAP enterprise applications ecosystem. In June 2021, Syntax acquired Illumiti, now a Syntax Company, an integration and management consulting services firm. This transaction allowed Syntax to position itself as a leader in the North American market in SAP solutions and professional services. Beyond reaffirms this commitment and creates an even stronger SAP expertise base.  
• Complementary Values-Driven Cultures: Prior to the transaction, both organizations placed emphasis on creating a similar corporate culture, focused on entrepreneurial spirit and customer satisfaction through their business values.

“Today’s business world is constantly changing. Every company, regardless of its size, needs a technology partner to define transformation strategies and achieve its operational objectives,” says Pascal Tremblay , President and CEO, Managing Partner at Novacap. “The acquisition of Solutions Beyond Technologies by Syntax embodies our commitment to the success of our clients, the development of our partnerships, our actions as exemplary corporate citizens and our position as an employer of choice for technology talent. As a joint team, we are very optimistic about the potential to create value for all of us. »  

Syntax is a portfolio company of Novacap TMT, a private equity firm based in Montreal.

Partnership Brings Android and iOS Cyber Defense Automation Inside the JetBrains TeamCity CI/CD Pipeline

Appdome, the mobile app economy's one-stop shop for mobile app defense, today announced it has integrated its Cyber Defense Automation Platform with the CI/CD cloud-based service from JetBrains TeamCity allowing teams to automate the build, test and deployment of their mobile applications. JetBrains TeamCity is now part of the Appdome Dev2Cyber Agility Partner Initiative to advance the delivery of secure mobile apps globally.

Manual methods of cyber defense implementations in Android and iOS apps are complex, slow and brittle. Appdome's cyber defense automation platform streamlines delivery and accelerates release times by using technology to build cybersecurity defenses into iOS and Android apps – including runtime application self-protection (RASP), code obfuscation, mobile data encryption, jailbreak detection, root detection, man-in-the-middle attack prevention, on-device anti-malware, anti-fraud, anti-cheat, anti-bot and other protections. The new Appdome-JetBrains TeamCity partnership solves mobile brands' need for technology platforms to automate the delivery of cyber defense in mobile apps and to keep pace with modern DevOps pipelines.

"Our recent global survey shows that consumers' preferred way to interact with brands is mobile, which increases the urgency for development teams to create and update apps frequently to remain competitive. They're working in an environment that is continuous, agile and fast-moving," said Tom Tovar, Co-Creator and CEO of Appdome. "Development teams need a cyber defense solution for mobile app development that takes advantage of and integrates with mobile development best practices and tooling. In this way, they can deliver the protections end-users desire in their iOS and Android apps, build by build and release by release."

Today, global consumers demand more protection than ever in their mobile app experiences. Appdome's recent Global Consumer Expectations of Mobile App Security survey revealed that 94% of global consumers would promote a brand if the mobile apps protected them against security, fraud and malware risks. 68% also indicated they would abandon brands that offered no protection.

"JetBrains TeamCity is a key development platform for mobile apps, and developers using it need to be able to build security protections into their apps rapidly from within the platform," said Karen Hsu, SVP of Mobile DevOps and Security Solutions. "This integration with JetBrains TeamCity enables brands and their development teams to meet growing demands from mobile users for stronger protection."