MongoDB Has Raised Another $80 Million

 
MongoDB, the company known for its next-generation open source database technology, has closed on nearly $80 million in new funding, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch.
According to a regulatory filing issued this week, which was signed by MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB has closed on $79.99 million so far in an equity offering worth a total of $100 million. That means there is just over $20 million in company stock remaining to be sold in the round. According to the document, the first sale in the offering was made on December 10, 2014.
When contacted yesterday, a company spokesperson confirmed the $80 million raise, but did not provide additional information on the remaining amount indicated in the offering.

This isn’t the first big money funding round for the New York City-based MongoDB. In October 2013, the company raised $150 million in Series E funding in what it said at the time was the largest round ever for a database company. That raise reportedly valued MongoDB at $1.2 billion. Being that MongoDB’s competition includes deep-pocketed entrenched database giants such as Oracle, the money should certainly come in handy.
The new funding comes as the company is apparently sharpening its focus on its financials. Yesterday, MongoDB announced that it has hired longtime software industry exec Carlos Delatorre to serve as its Chief Revenue Officer.

This post has been updated after receiving confirmation from the company.

Written by : Colleen Taylor (@loyalelectron)
Posted Jan 9, 2015
Link : http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/09/mongodb-funding-filing/

IBM Software Defined Environment (SDE)

 This IBM Redbooks publication introduces the IBM Software Defined Environment (SDE) as a solution which helps to optimize the entire computing infrastructure — compute, storage and network resources — so that it can adapt to the type of work required. In today's environment, resources are assigned manually to workloads; that happens automatically in a SDE. In a SDE, workloads are dynamically assigned to IT resources based on application characteristics, best-available resources, and service level policies to deliver continuous, dynamic optimization and reconfiguration to address infrastructure issues. Underlying all of this are policy-based compliance checks and updates, in a centrally managed environment.

 

This IBM Redbooks publication gives a broad understanding of the new architecture. Think integration, automation and optimization. Those are enablers to cloud delivery and analytics. SDE has the capability to accelerate business success by making a happy marriage between workloads and resources so you have a responsive, adaptive environment.
With IBM’s Software Defined Environment, infrastructure is fully programmable to rapidly deploy workloads on optimal resources and to instantly respond to changing business demands.
This IBM Redbooks publication is targeted toward IBM Sellers/CSI/ MSP teams, IBM architects, STG brand specialists, distributors, resellers and anyone developing and implementing SDE.

Read more & discover the IBM Redbooks publication at : http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg248238.html

#DATA #CLOUD #ENGAGEMENT

IDC Data Shows IBM Security Outpacing the Market

With the massive media coverage of today’s advanced threats, customers and thought leaders are recognizing that a comprehensive, integrated approach rather than a proliferation of point products is necessary. IDC recently released its 2013 security software market share data, which showed that IBM Security gained share, maintained leadership positions and dramatically outpaced the market. This is substantive support for our value proposition.

“According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker analysis for calendar year 2013, IBM Security Systems maintained its number one position in identity and access management (IAM) and security vulnerability management (SVM), which includes security information and event management (SIEM), and improved its share in endpoint security and network security,” IDC said in a statement on the findings, which have not yet been released to the public. “IBM significantly outpaced overall security software market growth and remained the number three security software vendor in 2013.”

IDC Reports What Our Customers Already Know

This data from IDC is solid evidence that customers and partners support IBM Security’s value proposition, products, support, engagements and all the investments we’ve made to grow the business; further evidenced by the division’s consistent double-digit growth, as pointed out during our earnings calls.

A steady supply of media coverage regarding the latest advanced persistent threats (APTs), cyber attacks and breaches have elevated the need for advanced security solutions to a boardroom priority. This constant buzz also raises the stakes: CISOs and partners demand the best security products and services from their chosen vendors and will quickly find alternatives whenever necessary. The competition is fierce and will only ramp up as startups enter the fray and established vendors consolidate in order to enter this market. But the trend is towards integration, collecting massive amounts of data, applying analytics against the data to identify prioritized offenses and taking action. A collection of disparate security products puts the burden on the customer or partner, neither of whom have the budget nor the advanced skills necessary to act effectively.

Our relentless pursuit of product excellence clearly demonstrates to our customers and partners that we intend to lead this market through innovation by executing our strategy and, most of all, by partnering with them to solve the problems they face constantly. We offer a clear distinction: Customers all over the world can choose to acquire a best-in-class product or an integrated and open security intelligence system from a single vendor.

 

 

 

By: John Burnham

Link : http://securityintelligence.com/idc-data-ibm-security-outpacing-market/#.U5a_5xA3b7c

IBM announces IBM i 7.2

 

Today, IBM announces the release of IBM i 7.2, the first new IBM i release in four years. This release provides significant new function in DB2 for i, systems management and security as well as enhancing many other integrated components and licensed programs. IBM i 7.2 includes support for and takes advantage of the latest Power Systems server family running on new POWER8 technology. 

 

IBM i 7.2 new enhancements include:

• Enhanced security options in DB2 for i
• Many new functions for programmer productivity and expanded function in DB2 for i
• Improved ease of use with IBM Navigator for i
• Enhancements to iAccess Client Solutions
• Extension of security to more applications through new single sign-on (SSO) environments
• Liberty Core as the base for Integrated Application Server
• Support for Zend Server 6.0 on IBM i 7.2
• Performance improvements for the IFS
• Extensions to the printing environments
• Expanded Hub functions for Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS)
• PowerHA SystemMirror for i Express Edition with new HyperSwap capability
• Support for new Power Systems built with POWER8 architecture and processor
• Additional I/O capabilities including support for WAN over LAN
• Rational tools enhancements to support Free Format RPG
• Support for the open-source file-serving solution Samba

IBM i 7.2 is supported on Power Systems servers and PureFlex systems with POWER8 processors, Power Systems servers and blades and PureFlex systems with POWER7/7+ processors, and Power Systems servers and blades with POWER6/6+ processors. Clients using POWER5/5+ servers or earlier servers must move to newer systems to take advantage of the new features in IBM i 7.2.

Clients running IBM i 7.1 or IBM i 6.1 can easily upgrade to IBM i 7.2, which will be available May 2, 2014, to benefit from the additional features and performance provided with the latest technologies included in the operating system.

To learn more, visit the IBM i 7.2 Knowledge Center website, and look for the May issue of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems edition, where IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will shares his thoughts on the new release.

By: Tami Deedrick

Link: http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/trends/ibmannouncements/i72_announce/?sf25525622=1

IBM FlashSystem 840 for Legacy-free Flash

Flash storage is at an interesting place and it’s worth taking the time to understand IBM’s new FlashSystem 840 and how it might be useful.

 

A traditional approach to flash is to treat it like a fast disk drive with a SAS interface, and assume that a faster version of traditional systems are the way of the future. This is not a bad idea, and with auto-tiering technologies this kind of approach was mastered by the big vendors some time ago, and can be seen for example in IBM’s Storwize family and DS8000, and as a cache layer in the XIV. Using auto-tiering we can perhaps expect large quantities of storage to deliver latencies around 5 millseconds, rather than a more traditional 10 ms or higher (e.g. MS Exchange’s jetstress test only fails when you get to 20 ms).

Some players want to use all SSDs in their disk systems, which you can do with Storwize for example, but this is again really just a variation on a fairly traditional approach and you’re generally looking at storage latencies down around one or two millseconds. That sounds pretty good compared to 10 ms, but there are ways to do better and I suspect that SSD-based systems will not be where it’s at in 5 years time.

The IBM FlashSystem 840 is a little different and it uses flash chips, not SSDs. It’s primary purpose is to be very very low latency. We’re talking as low as 90 microseconds write, and 135 microseconds read. This is not a traditional system with a soup-to-nuts software stack. FlashSystem has a new Storwize GUI, but it is stripped back to keep it simple and to avoid anything that would impact latency.

This extreme low latency is a unique IBM proposition, since it turns out that even when other vendors use MLC flash chips instead of SSDs, by their own admission they generally still end up with latency close to 1 ms, presumably because of their controller and code-path overheads.

• 2u appliance with hot swap modules, power and cooling, controllers etc
• Concurrent firmware upgrade and call-home support
• Encryption is standard
• Choice of 16G FC, 8G FC, 40G IB and 10G FCoE interfaces
• Choice of upgradeable capacity

Nett of 2-D RAID5	4 modules	8 modules	12 modules
2GB modules	4 TB	12 TB	20 TB
4GB modules	8 TB	24 TB	40 TB

• Also a 2 TB starter option with RAID0
• Each module has 10 flash chips and each chip has 16 planes
• RAID5 is applied both across modules and within modules
• Variable stripe RAID within modules is self-healing

I’m thinking that prime targets for these systems include Databases and VDI, but also folks looking to future-proof their general performance. If you’re making a 5 year purchase, not everyone will want to buy a ‘mature’ SSD legacy-style flash solution, when they could instead buy into a disk-free architecture of the future.

But, as mentioned, FlashSystem does not have a full traditional software stack, so let’s consider the options if you need some of that stuff:

• IMHO, when it comes to replication, databases are usually best replicated using log shipping, Oracle Data Guard etc.
• VMware volumes can be replicated with native VMware server-based tools.
• AIX volumes can be replicated using AIX Geographic Mirroring.
• On AIX and some other systems you can use logical volume mirroring to set up a mirror of your volumes with preferred read set to the FlashSystem 840, and writes mirrored to a V7000 or (DS8000 or XIV etc), thereby allowing full software stack functions on the volumes (on the V7000) without slowing down the reads off the FlashSystem.
• You can also virtualize FlashSystem behind SVC or V7000
• Consider using Tivoli Storage Manager dedup disk to disk to create a DR environment

Right now, FlashSystem 840 is mainly about screamingly low latency and high performance, with some reasonable data center class credentials, and all at a pretty good price. If you have a data warehouse, or a database that wants that kind of I/O performance, or a VDI implementation that you want to de-risk, or a general workload that you want to future-proof, then maybe you should talk to IBM about FlashSystem 840.

By: Jim

Link: http://storagebuddhist.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/ibm-flashsystem-840-for-legacy-free-flash/

Made in IBM Labs: Enabling dynamic prioritization of data in the Cloud

As more and more companies take advantage of applications, processes and services delivered via the cloud, vendors are struggling with increased complexity and challenges associated with ensuring uninterrupted data availability. IBM's patented technique creates a cloud environment in which Quality of Service priorities can be modified according to real-time or expected conditions, to reduce data bottlenecks in the cloud, thereby ensuring that clients receive the level and quality of service they expect.

The new invention will help alleviate problems that cloud providers face when they need to provide simultaneous, efficient and uninterrupted service to a range of clients for applications, including online banking and shopping, real-time video, supply-chain management, enterprise resources planning and more. 

"Since companies are relying upon the cloud to manage and process critical business data and interactions, guaranteeing and delivering quality, reliable service is an imperative for cloud vendors," said IBM Cloud Offering Evangelist Rick Hamilton. "This patented invention will enable cloud service providers to dynamically respond to potential data choke points by changing quality of service priorities to ensure the free flow of data for their clients." 

IBM received U.S Patent #8,631,154 "Dynamically modifying quality of service levels for resources in a networked computing environment," for the invention. 

Since beginning work with clients and partners around cloud computing in 2007, IBM continues to focus building clouds for enterprise clients. IBM provides cloud services and collaborates with clients to create new opportunities to reach more of the market or extend their services leveraging cloud delivery.

For 21 consecutive years, IBM has been the leading recipient of U.S. patents. IBM inventors have patented thousands of inventions that will enable significant innovations that will position IBM to compete and lead in strategic areas, such as IBM Watson, cloud computing, Big Data analytics – and advance the new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and interact with people in more natural ways.

About IBM Cloud Computing 

IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. 

By: Pr Newswire
Link: http://cloudcomputing.ulitzer.com/node/3054837

IBM Power8 rollout to start with scale out clusters

Officially, IBM has said that would be launching its twelve-core Power8 processors in new Power Systems servers and PureSystems converged systems sometime around the middle of the year. But as EnterpriseTech has previously reported, the word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to get the first Power8 machines into the field sometime around the end of April or early May. If the latest scuttlebutt is right, then it looks like the first Power8 systems will be entry machines that can be clustered up to run supercomputing simulations, Hadoop analytics, parallel databases, and similar modern distributed workloads.

Or, as the case may turn out, homemade Power8 systems that might possibly be used by Google in its vast infrastructure or souped up boxes aimed at high frequency traders, as EnterpriseTech has previously told you about.

A late April or early May launch would coincide with the Impact2014 event that Big Blue is hosting for customers and partners in Las Vegas from April 27 through May 1. The company is also participating in the annual COMMON conference for customers of its IBM i (formerly OS/400) midrange system, which runs from May 4 through 7. While the IBM i server business is considerably smaller than it was 15 years ago at its peak, Power Systems machines running IBM i are still used by around 150,000 customers worldwide and that operating system is only available on Power-based servers from IBM. Significantly, most of those customers tend to buy entry-level machines because their workloads are fairly modest by modern standards, and this is also the same class of machine you might use if you wanted to build a Hadoop cluster running atop Linux on Power chips. Doing one big push to cover many different markets make sense, particularly with IBM trimming costs as Power Systems revenues have been on the decline.

Just like other chip makers – notably Intel, AMD, Oracle, and Fujitsu in the enterprise space – IBM staggers its chip launches, although in this case it controls both the chips and the systems unlike Intel and, for the most part, AMD. For the past several processor generations, IBM has started the Power chip launch in the middle of its line, with machines that have from 4 to 16 sockets in a single system image. These are relatively low volume products, so it gave IBM time to ramp up its 45 nanometer process for eight-core Power7 chips and 32 nanometer process for eight-core Power7+ chips. The Power7+ had some microarchitecture improvements to boost per-core performance and a whole lot more cache per core to push the performance up even further. Then IBM launched entry machines using the chip, and in the case of the Power7, finished up with a 32-socket box that has a specially packaged version of the Power7 that allows it to clock higher than in the entry and midrange machines. The high-end machine in the Power Systems line does not get an upgrade to the “plus” variants of any processor, by the way. Whether or not IBM maintains this practice remains to be seen.

If history is any guide, IBM will have a high-end Power machine with 16 or 32 sockets available by the fall, for the big year-end sales push.

 

Starting at the bottom of the line this time around makes sense given that Intel refreshed its Xeon E5 processor lineup back in September with variants with six, ten, and twelve cores. If IBM wants to sell scale-out clusters based on Power8 chips against Intel, systems based on Xeon E5 v2 processors are the ones Big Blue has to beat.

The mantra coming out of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group about the Power8 launch is cloud, big data, open, and scale out. The open part means linking the Power8 launch to the OpenPower Consortium, which IBM started last year with Google, Nvidia, Tyan, and Mellanox Technologies. The consortium now has 14 paid members who are contributing to firmware, hypervisor, motherboard, and other parts of the Power8 system design, and one company, a startup called Suzhou PowerCore, licensing the Power8 chip to create its own variants of the processor for the Chinese server, storage, and switching markets. Sources at IBM tell EnterpriseTech that there are more than 100 other companies that have expressed interest in joining the OpenPower Consortium.

The Power8 chip, like its predecessors, is probably relatively large compared to a Xeon E5 part and will probably consume more electricity and dissipate more heat, even though it uses a 22 nanometer process that puts it on par with what Intel can deliver at the moment. IBM’s 64-bit Power chips have always been larger and hotter than their Intel equivalents, but they make up for it with more throughput, enabled by radically higher I/O and memory bandwidth. The twelve-core Power8 chip will sport 96 MB of L3 cache on the die and will have an additional 16 MB of L4 cache on each “Centaur” buffer chip embedded on the memory cards used with Power8 systems. (On a 16-core system linked gluelessly by the NUMA interconnect on each Power8 chip, that is a total of 128 MB of L4 cache on a system that can have 16 TB of main memory across those sockets. That machine will have 192 cores, and the interconnect has an extra link in it now so any socket can get to any other socket in one or two hops instead of a maximum of three.)

The interesting thing to consider as we head out to the GPU Technical Conference hosted by Nvidia is precisely how Big Blue and the graphics chip maker are going to collaborate on ceepie-geepie systems starting with the Power8 generation and moving forward from there. Back in november at the SC13 supercomputing conference, Brad McCredie, vice president of Power Systems development within IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, told EnterpriseTech that the two companies were in the process of modifying the Power8 systems to better accommodate Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs and would be tweaking the IBM software stack to accelerate it with those GPUs. The Power8 chips have on-die PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral controllers. The jump to PCI-Express 3.0 is necessary to quickly move data back and forth between the CPU and GPU as they share work; the PCI-Express 2.0 used on Power7 and Power7+ chips was too slow to push these accelerators or high-speed InfiniBand and Ethernet cards.

To simplify the programing model for hybrid systems and speed up the data transfers between the CPUs and GPUs, IBM created what it calls the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface, or CAPI, which will be first implemented on the Power8 chip. This is an overlay for the PCI protocol that creates a virtual memory space comprised of the CPU main memory and any memory used by any kind of accelerator that plugs into the PCI bus – GPU, FPGA, DSP, whatever have you.

The CAPI interface will work with the Tesla GPU accelerators and the virtual memory in the CUDA environment to manage the movement of data between main and frame buffer memory, transparent to the application. Nvidia announced unified memory between the X86 CPUs and Tesla GPUs with CUDA 6 last fall ahead of the SC13 event. (It is probably not a coincidence that the accelerator side of the chart above is in two shades of green and black. The nearly unreadable print in the light green box says “Custom Hardware Application, FPGA or ASIC” in case you can’t read it.)

IBM has been very clear that it wants to accelerate Java workloads with GPUs, and work is progressing to get such acceleration into the field perhaps by 2015 or so. That is also, perhaps not coincidentally, when IBM expects to have a clean-slate system design based on Power chips and future Nvidia GPU coprocessors in the field that more tightly links the two together. Java, of course, is the language of choice for a lot of enterprise applications, mainly because it is easier to work with than C or C++ and more widely known than any of the legacy programming languages on IBM systems.

The thing to remember, as we have pointed out before, is that IBM can have a much tighter partnership with Nvidia than either Intel or AMD can. It is reasonable to expect for the two companies to work more closely together on traditional supercomputing systems as well as other kinds of clustered and accelerated systems used throughout enterprises. Hopefully, the two companies will make some of their long-term plans clear at the GPU Technology Conference.

By: Timothy Prickett  Morgan
Link: http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/03/24/ibm-power8-rollout-start-scale-clusters/

IBM BlueMix: PaaS Play, explained

With BlueMix, IBM gives customers a cloud path for legacy apps. Here's how SoftLayer, Cloud Foundry, and WebSphere tools fit in.

IBM is putting together a PaaS platform that it has dubbed BlueMix, which is a combination of open source code, IBM software tools, and Big Blue's tried and true WebSphere middleware used by many of its oldest customers. In effect, it's investing $1 billion to give enterprise customers a path to move legacy systems into the cloud.

For enterprise users who want to move an application into IBM's SoftLayer unit's public cloud, the many components of IBM WebSphere middleware will be there and waiting as callable services through a SoftLayer API. IBM acquired SoftLayer and its 700 employees last July and made its provisioning, management, and chargeback systems the core of its future cloud services.

Not so fast, you say. IBM's Blu Acceleration for DB2, Watson advanced analytics, Cognos business intelligence, and many versions of WebSphere run on IBM Power Systems servers, not the cloud's ubiquitous x86 servers.

Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM's SoftLayer unit, agrees that's the case. And that's why Power servers are now being incorporated into the SoftLayer cloud. It will be one of the few public clouds with a paired hardware architecture approach. Crosby declined to predict how many Power servers may be added or what percentage they would become. SoftLayer currently has about 150,000 x86 servers. IBM is adding 4,000 to 5,000 x86 servers to that number a month, and x86 will remain the majority by a wide margin, Crosby told InformationWeek.

"Power servers were never about volume. They're about more memory capacity and processing power" to handle enterprise ERP and database applications, which require large amounts of both, Crosby said.

In addition, IBM is making a broad set of its data analytics, Rational development tools and applications, such as Q9 security and Maximo inventory management, available on SoftLayer as software-as-a-service. Developers producing next-generation applications will have the option of using services from IBM's software portfolio that they're already familiar with, Crosby added. IBM Tivoli systems management software will also be made available, though no date was announced. Crosby said IBM will seek to get the bulk of its portfolio into the BlueMix PaaS by the end of the year.

Although there's a strong legacy component, IBM claims the $1 billion figure comes into play because that's the amount it's spending to break Rational tools, WebSphere middleware, and IBM applications down into services and make them available via SoftLayer. It's also using part of that figure to acquire the database-as-a-service firm, Cloudant.

About two dozen tools and pieces of middleware are available for the beta release of BlueMix, with 150 to 200 products to become available when the cloud-enablement conversion process is done.

Much of the $1 billion will be needed to convert IBM's huge, software portfolio currently sold under the packaged and licensed model into a set of "composable services," employed by developers to become parts of new applications. Only a fraction of that portfolio is ready with BlueMix's beta launch on Feb.24. Crosby said the way IBM would have handled such an announcement in the past was to wait until it was finished converting distinct products or product sets before going public. But that's the old enterprise way of doing things.

IBM is trying to adopt more of "born on the web" or agile development approach, where software gets changed as soon as one update is ready and production systems have short upgrade cycles. "Our goal is to follow the mantra of the agile development approach as soon as we can," said Crosby.

IBM middleware will often appear through BlueMix incorporated into a predefined "pattern" created by IBM. BlueMix on SoftLayer will give developers the ability to capture a snapshot of a pattern with each application, so that it "can be deployed to 10 datacenters in an identical fashion at the click of a button," said Crosby. The capability is called "patterns," often consisting of an application, a Web server, IBM middleware, and a database service.

BlueMix will run in SoftLayer on top of the open source platform, Cloud Foundry, originally sponsored as a project by VMware. Cloud Foundry became the charge of the Pivotal subsidiary, as it was spun out of VMware and EMC. Now its organizers say they are moving the PaaS project out into its own foundation and governing board. The Apache Software Foundation, OpenStack, and other key open source code projects have followed a similar route to gain the broadest possible backing.

There are 20 million developers in the world, and three-quarters of them have yet to develop a cloud application or work with a cloud-based platform as a service, according to Evans Data, which regularly surveys developers' attitudes and skills around the world. IBM is launching BlueMix as a combination of open source code and proprietary software to capture its share of their future work in the cloud.

IBM announced in January that it was expanding the SoftLayer chain of datacenters from 13 to 40 locations around the world to give SoftLayer a competitive global reach. It is spending $1.2 billion this year on that initiative.

By: Charles Babcock
Link: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/ibm-bluemix-paas-play-explained/d/d-id/1113979

Knock out your mobile development deadlines with IBM Worklight

Have you been asked to deliver new functionality or a new application with an impossible deadline? How about deliver a fully featured and integrated mobile application for multiple platforms in five weeks? Yes, I know that is a ridiculous timeline. However, is it possible? With the help of an IBM Premier Business Partner (Avnet Technology Solutions) and IBM Worklight, we were able to deliver an application on time and on budget.

How is that even possible?

In a recent blog post, “ IBM Worklight to the rescue: Saving your company's reputation,” I discussed how the remote disable function of IBM Worklight could provide significant value to a company that needed to deny access to a specific version of their application. I recently completed a mobile application project with an IBM client that was successful in part because of the remote disable and direct update features of IBM Worklight.

So what did we really deliver?

We delivered a hybrid application built using JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS that would be approved by and available in iOS and Android app stores with custom phone and tablet versions. The application was tested on multiple devices, operating systems and form factors. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but here is a high-level list of the functional requirements that were delivered.

• Push notifications
• Remote database integration for lead and data collection
• Device calendar integration (add events to personal calendars)
• Custom Twitter integration
• Custom RSS feed
• Worklight analytics 

How did Worklight help make this possible?

We were able to ensure that this project was delivered as promised with several easy-to-use features that are included with IBM Worklight:

• Adapters– secure integration with remote resources
• Automated mobile functional testing– same test runs across multiple devices and mobile operating systems
• Unified push notification APIs– polled server-side apps to dispatch notifications, uniform access to push notification providers and the ability to monitor and control notification delivery
• Direct update– web resources pushed to app when application connects to the Worklight Server

The application used SQL and HTTP adapters to store customer information and to insert push notification messages into a database that was polled regularly. When a new entry was found in the push notification table, the polling process would create and send a new push notification through the unified push notification APIs. The direct update feature was used after the basic application structure had been created and accepted by the app stores. We finished the basic application structure, and it was accepted in the app stores about three weeks into the project. This provided the team with two weeks to make content changes and correct any defects that were found during testing.

In the end, the project was successful and the application was very well received by its users.

By: Drew Douglass
Link: http://asmarterplanet.com/mobile-enterprise/blog/2014/02/knock-mobile-development-deadlines-ibm-worklight.html