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Companies that are successfully maximizing their AI investments are seeing at least a 25% improvement in their revenue growth rate, according to a new report from IBM. The company surveyed 2,000 companies across the U.S., U.K, India, Japan, and Germany, and categorized 15% as AI Leaders who are ahead of their peers and the other 85% as AI Learners. According to the report, there are four key factors that contribute to the success AI Leaders are seeing.  Compared to their peers, AI Leaders: Are more aggressive with their AI investments Are more confident in their ability to access and manage their organization’s data Have a C-suite that is fully aligned with IT leadership on what they need to do to achieve AI maturity Can customize their AI efforts to achieve optimal value.  “We discovered that Leaders don’t mindlessly chase trends. Instead, they look for the intersection of opportunity, need and internal capabilities to develop an action-oriented roadmap. They foster organi

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivers mail to almost 167 million addresses in the United States, and anyone who has tried to order something online has likely had the experience of not getting a package delivered on time (or at all) because the address was entered incorrectly or in a weird format, causing shipping delays. The USPS has a standard format it accepts, but it’s not standard around the world. Internationally there are over 200 different address formats used and more than 20 language scripts used to write those addresses.  Given the complexity of considering all of these different global formats, using a verification service like Melissa’s Global Address service can help ensure that all addresses are properly formatted based on where they need to go, which improves deliverability. John DeMatteo, solutions engineer I at Melissa , explained in a recent SD Times microwebinar that “fewer errors and returns equals more time to be working on other things, as well as l

Several high profile software supply chain security incidents over the last few years have put more of a spotlight on the need to have visibility into the software supply chain. However, it seems as though those efforts may not be leading to the desired outcomes, as a new survey found that only one out of five organizations believe they have that visibility into every component and dependency in their software. The survey, Anchore’s 2024 Software Supply Chain Security Report , also found that less than half of respondents are following supply chain best practices like creating software bill-of-materials (SBOMs) for the software they develop (49% of respondents) or for open source projects they use (45%) of respondents. Additionally, only 41% of respondents request SBOMs from the third-party vendors they use. Despite these low numbers, this is a significant improvement from 2022’s survey, when less than a third of respondents were following these practices.  The report found that 78%

  Tricentis , a global leader in continuous testing and quality engineering, today announced the expansion of its test management and analytics platform,  Tricentis qTest , with the launch of Tricentis qTest Copilot. The latest addition to its suite of generative AI-powered   Tricentis Copilot  solutions, qTest Copilot harnesses the power of generative AI to simplify and accelerate test case generation, allowing for greater test coverage and higher quality software releases. qTest Copilot is a generative AI assistant that automatically drafts test cases and test steps based on source documents and user requirements, offering considerable time-saving benefits when compared to manual approaches. Embedded into the newest version of the qTest platform, qTest Copilot combines Tricentis’ scalable and unified test management technology, with new AI-augmented features to allow QA and developer teams to greatly accelerate software delivery. Users can quickly create test coverage of any applic

Symbiotic Security  today launched the industry’s first real-time security for software development that combines detection and remediation with just-in-time training – incorporating security testing and training directly into the development process without breaking developers’ workflows. Backed with $3 million of seed funding from investors including  Lerer Hippeau ,  Axeleo Capital ,  Factorial Capital , and others, the company has introduced its software-as-a-service that works with the developer’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and enables them to develop software more securely. A  Ponemon survey  of 634 IT and IT security practitioners reported the top challenges to shift-left security were: a lack of integrated security tools (51%); an increase in work for developers (43%); too many vulnerabilities to fix (40%). These are precisely the challenges addressed by Symbiotic Security. “Traditional approaches to code security are broken, which we fix by integrating securit

GitHub Copilot’s chat functionality is being updated to provide developers guidance on how to reword their prompts so that they can get better responses.  Microsoft shared that user feedback on GitHub Copilot indicated that some developers struggle with creating prompts, including understanding phrasing and what context to include.  “In some cases, the experience left users feeling like they were getting too much or too little from their interactions,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post .  In response to this, GitHub Copilot’s chat will now be a more conversational experience that can adapt to a developer’s specific context and needs.  For example, if a developer asks a question that is too vague, like “what is this?,” Copilot will now respond back saying that the “question is ambiguous because it lacks specific context or content” and will suggest some prompts that are more specific and will lead to better responses. In this example, the response included other sample prompts, like “

One of Google’s security research initiatives, Project Zero, has successfully managed to detect a zero-day memory safety vulnerability using LLM assisted detection. “We believe this is the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software,” the team wrote in a post . Project Zero is a security research team at Google that studies zero-day vulnerabilities, and back in June they announced Project Naptime , a framework for LLM assisted vulnerability research. In recent months, Project Zero teamed up with Google DeepMind and turned Project Naptime into Big Sleep, which is what discovered the vulnerability.  The vulnerability discovered by Big Sleep was a stack buffer overflow in SQLite. The Project Zero team reported the vulnerability to the developers in October, who were able to fix it on the same day. Additionally, the vulnerability was discovered before it appeared in an official release. “We think th

Building a career as a software developer can be valuable, but can be a competitive field to break into, especially in 2024 when over 130,000 layoffs have occurred at tech companies already. While not all 130,000 may have been software engineers, they have not been immune from the cuts. One way developers can set themselves up for better opportunities is to pursue certifications for skills that are relevant to their career. A certification offers an opportunity for developers to show others that they have a particular skill; It’s one thing to list Kubernetes as a core competency on their resume, and another to say they’ve passed the certification exam for one of the CNCF’s Kubernetes certifications .   “People are really happy by taking a certification, because it is the validation of some knowledge,” said  Christophe Sauthier, head of CNCF certifications and trainings, in a recent episode of our What the Dev? podcast . “It is something that we feel is really important because an

In today’s rapidly evolving observability and security use cases, the concept of “shifting left” has moved beyond just software development. With the consistent and rapid rise of data volumes across logs, metrics, traces, and events, organizations are required to be a lot more thoughtful in efforts to turn chaos into control when it comes to understanding and managing their streaming data sets. Teams are striving to be more proactive in the management of their mission critical production systems and need to achieve far earlier detection of potential issues. This approach emphasizes moving traditionally late-stage activities — like seeing, understanding, transforming, filtering, analyzing, testing, and monitoring — closer to the beginning of the data creation cycle. With the growth of next-generation architectures, cloud-native technologies, microservices, and Kubernetes, enterprises are increasingly adopting Telemetry Pipelines to enable this shift. A key element in this movement is th

Microsoft has announced that GitHub Copilot is now integrated with Data Wrangler , an extension for VS Code for viewing, cleaning, and preparing data.  By integrating GitHub Copilot capabilities into the tool, users will now be able to clean and transform data in VS Code with natural language prompts. It will also be able to provide suggestions of how to fix errors in data transformation code.  According to Microsoft, one of the current limitations of using AI for exploratory data analysis is that the AI often lacks context of the data, leading to more generalized responses. Further, the process of verifying that the generated code is correct can be a very manual and time-consuming process.  The integration of Data Wrangler and GitHub Copilot addresses these issues because it allows the user to provide GitHub Copilot with data context, enabling the tool to generate code for a specific dataset. It also provides a preview of the behavior of the code, which allows users to visuall

The API management platform WSO2 has announced a slew of new updates aimed at helping customers manage APIs in a technology landscape increasingly dependent on AI and Kubernetes. The updates span the releases of WSO2 API Manager 4.4, WSO2 API Platform for Kubernetes (APK) 1.2, and WSO2 API Microgateway 3.2, which are all available today.  “As organizations seek a competitive edge through innovative digital experiences, they need to invest equally in state-of-the-art technologies and in fostering the productivity of their software development teams,” said Christopher Davey, vice president and general manager of API management at WSO2. “With new functionality for managing AI services as APIs and extended support for Kubernetes as the preferred platform for digital innovation, WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 APK are continuing to enhance developers’ experiences while delivering a future-proof environment for their evolving needs.” The company announced its Egress API Management capability,

The database company Aerospike has announced the latest version of its Kubernetes Operator with new features that improve backup and scalability.  The Aerospike Kubernetes Operator (AKO) enables users to simplify management and monitoring of their Aerospike databases.  AKO 3.4 incorporates the recently launched Aerospike Backup Service (ABS), which allows for easy management of backup jobs across Aerospike clusters. ABS runs on a VM or Docker container and provides a set of REST API endpoints for backing up and restoring database clusters. It allows for both full and incremental backups, supports the creation of different backup policies and schedules, and offers usability improvements over the traditional asbackup and asrestore command line tools.  Additionally, with this release, the company has doubled the default resource limits to better support customers needing to scale.  Another new capability in AKO 3.4 is the ability to pause all AKO operations and then easily resu

Product-led growth (PLG) has become the golden standard for SaaS companies aiming to scale rapidly and efficiently. In fact, a 2024 survey from ProductLed.com found that 91% of respondents are planning to invest more resources in PLG initiatives this year. As an advocate for this approach personally, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of putting the product at the center of customer acquisition and retention strategies.  Admittedly, the path to successful PLG implementation has some challenges that can derail even the most promising companies. Specifically, the organizations that are transitioning from more traditional enterprise growth models may, in fact, have difficulty when navigating the change in dynamic – either from technology or leadership transitioning. As such, I’d like to explain three common missteps that organizations often encounter when adopting a PLG strategy and discuss how to overcome them. By understanding these pitfalls, organizations can better p

IBM is releasing a family of AI agents (IBM SWE-Agent 1.0) that are powered by open LLMs and can resolve GitHub issues automatically, freeing up developers to work on other things rather than getting bogged down by their backlog of bugs that need fixing.  “For most software developers, every day starts with where the last one left off. Trawling through the backlog of issues on GitHub you didn’t deal with the day before, you’re triaging which ones you can fix quickly, which will take more time, and which ones you really don’t know what to do with yet. You might have 30 issues in your backlog and know you only have time to tackle 10,” IBM wrote in a blog post . This new family of agents aims to alleviate this burden and shorten the time developers are spending on these tasks.  One of the agents is a localization agent that can find the file and line of code that is causing an error. According to IBM, the process of finding the correct line of code related to a bug report can be a time

OpenAI is updating ChatGPT so that its responses include results from the web, bringing the power of the search engine directly into the chat interface. “This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more,” OpenAI wrote in a post . According to OpenAI, ChatGPT will automatically decide whether a web search is warranted based on the prompt. Users can also directly tell it to search the web by selecting the web search icon under the prompt field.   Chats will include a link to the web source so that the user can visit that site for more information. A new Sources panel will display on the right hand side of the chat with a list of all sources.  OpenAI partnered with specific news and data providers to get up-to-date information and visual designers for weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps. For instance, asking about the weather will result in a graphic that shows the five day forecast and stock questio