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Category: Delphix

Walk around almost any software development shop or university CS department and you’ll be struck by the underrepresentation of women. At least you would be were this not an expected norm of our industry. And of course much has been written about this recently hot topic in Silicon Valley. What do companies and organizations do about it? At Delphix our culture is one of focus and purpose; our approach to diversity follows in that spirit.

We’re now in the third year of offering the Delphix Scholarship for Women, our contribution to encouraging more women to pursue a technical degree and enter the industry. The scholarship recognizes women whose projects embody some of the cultural attributes we value highly at Delphix such as exploration, creativity, and end-to-end ownership.

In previous years we’ve particularly recognized women whose projects addressed needs they saw first-hand, solutions that they wanted to use themselves. We love seeing how applicants identify problems and work creatively on novel solutions owning the whole process from inception to delivery. Submissions close on Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 11:59pm PST; I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Oracle OpenWorld is always a huge event for us at Delphix; it brings together our customers and partners like nothing else. And so it was the perfect venue to launch our new Delphix user group: Sync.

In its history Delphix has learned best from our customers. As I heard Marc Benioff opine at Dropbox’s inaugural event this morning, customers are the greatest source of a company’s innovation. At Delphix we’ve built an incredible multi-tool; our customers have taught us dozens of new ways of using it to deliver value to their organizations. Further, the most compelling education has always been user-to-user. Sync is the forum for local, global, live, and virtual events to build connections between users as well as directly into Delphix development.

Our Sync event last week featured customer speakers from McGraw Hill Financial, US Foods and Stubhub. A major theme was Delphix as a catalyst for devops implementation in the enterprise. We also shared performance best practices from Vinay Srihari, our VP of architecture, and engaged in a discussion about the product roadmap with deep-dives in particular areas.

There are many more events to come. We’ve already got a virtual event on masking and a local Seattle event in the works. I look forward to growing the community of Delphix users, and bringing them together. Stay connected or offer to host a Sync event by sending mail to sync@delphix.com.

I gave a presentation today on the methods and reasons of blogging for Delphix Engineering.

One of my points was that presentations make for simple blog posts–practice what you preach!

In the frenzied, insular world of a Silicon Valley startup it can be easy to lose perspective on the broader community in which we live and work. Among the great hackathon projects to come from our bi-annual engineering event was the idea of “Angel Sharks”, a group of volunteers at Delphix who provide opportunities for volunteering and community giving. Earlier this year, this group organized volunteer events around the launch of new Delphix releases.

We just completed our first “Week of Giving”. While many at Delphix already donate their time and money, the Angel Sharks organized giving and corporate matching. Our theme for 2014 was hunger; we focused on the SF-Marin Food Bank as our featured organization.

Over 50% of Delphix employees participated worldwide; a high bar that I’d like to see us exceed next year. Some activities of note were volunteering at food banks in the SF Bay Area, Atlanta and Boulder, toy donations to Toys for Tots, the Salvation Army Giving Tree, and the Starlight Foundation, and a silent auction that both brought the Delphix community closer together and raised over $3,000 for the SF-Marin Food Bank. More than $21,000 was raised in total with 30% of employees making matching requests in just three weeks! The Week of Giving brought a great energy and community spirit to the company; I’m excited to have giving as part of our DNA as a young company.

The SF-Marin Food Bank feeds 225,000 people annually with 47m lbs of food, and 96% of donations go directly to their programs. Donations are down for the year while need has increased by 1m lbs. You can donate here. I volunteered twice this year with my Delphix colleagues, and once with my wife and son (8 years old); I highly recommend it for both corporate and family outings.

Happy holidays from the Delphix family!

 

Delphix custsignsomers include top companies across a wide range of industries, most of them executing around the clock. Should a problem arise they require support from Delphix around the clock as well. To serve our customers’ needs we’ve drawn from industry best-practices while recently mixing in an unconventional approach to providing the best possible customer service regardless of when a customer encounters a problem.

There are three common approaches to support: outsourcing, shifts, and “follow the sun”. Outsourcing is economical but quality and consistency suffer especially for difficult cases. Asking outstanding engineers to cover undesirable shifts is unappealing. An on-call rotation (shifts “lite”) may be more tolerable but can be inadequate — and stressful — in a crisis. Hiring a geographically dispersed team — whose natural work day “follows the sun” — provides a more durable solution but has its own challenges. Interviewing is tough. Training is tougher. And maintaining education and consistency across the globe is nearly impossible.

Live communication simplifies training. New support engineers learn faster with live — ideally local — mentors, experts on a wide range of relevant technologies. The team is more able to stay current on the product and tools by working collaboratively. In a traditional “follow the sun” model, the first support engineer in a new locale is doubly disadvantaged — the bulk of the team is unavailable during the work day, and there’s no local experienced team for collaboration.

At Delphix, we don’t outsource our support engineering. We do hire around the globe, and we do have an on-call schedule. We’ve also drawn inspiration from an innovative approach employed by Moneypenny, a UK-based call center. Moneypenny had resisted extending their service to off-hours because they didn’t want to incur the detrimental effects of shift work to employee’s health and attitude. They didn’t want to outsource work because they were afraid customer satisfaction would suffer. Instead they took the novel step of opening an Auckland office — 12 hours offset — and sending employees for 4-6 months on a voluntary basis.

I was idly listening to NPR in the car when I heard the BBC report on Moneypenny. Their customers and employees raved about the approach. It was such a simple and elegant solution to the problem of around the clock support; I pulled over to consider the implications for Delphix Support. The cost of sending a support engineer to a remote destination would be paltry compared with the negative consequences associated with other approaches to support: weak hires, inconsistent methodologies, insufficient mentorship, not to mention underserved, angry, or lost customers. And the benefits to customers and the rest of the team would again far exceed the expense.

We call it the Delphix Support “term abroad.” As with a term abroad in school, it’s an opportunity for one of our experienced support engineers to work in a foreign locale. Delphix provides lodging in a sufficiently remote timezone with the expectation of a fairly normal work schedule. As with Moneypenny, that means that Delphix is able to provide the same high level of technical support at all times of day. In addition, that temporarily remote engineer can help to build a local team by recruiting, interviewing, and mentoring.

David — the longest tenured member of the Delphix support team — recently returned from a term abroad to the UK where he joined Scott, a recent hire and UK native. Scott spent a month working with David and others at our Menlo Park headquarters. Then David joined Scott in the UK to continue his mentorship and training. Both worked cases that would have normally paged the on-call engineer. A day after arriving in the UK, in fact, David and Scott handled two cases that would have otherwise woken up an engineer based in the US.

Early results give us confidence that the term abroad is going to be a powerful and complementary tool. Delphix provides the same high quality support at all hours, while expanding globally and increasing the satisfaction of the team. And it makes Delphix Support an even more attractive place to work for those who want to opt in to a little global adventure.

Data breaches make headlines at a regular cadence. Each is a surprise, but they are not, as a whole, surprising. While the extensive and sophisticated Target breach stuck in the headlines, a significant breach at three South Korean credit card companies happened around the same time. The theft of personal information for 20m subscribers didn’t have near the level of sophistication. Developers and contractors were simply given copies of production databases filled with personal information that they shouldn’t have been able to access.

When talking to Delphix customers and prospects, those that handle personal or sensitive information (typically financial services or heath care) inevitably ask how Delphix can help with masking. Turning the question around, asking how they mask data today sucks the air out of the room. Some deflect, talking about relevant requirements and regulations; others, pontificate obliquely about solutions they’ve bought; no one unabashedly claims to be fully implemented and fully compliant.

Data masking is hard to deploy consistently. I hear it from (honest) customers, and from data masking vendors. The striking attribute of the South Korean breach was that the Economist and other non-technical news sources called out unmasked data as the root cause:

“In 2012 a law was passed requiring the encryption of most companies’ databases, yet the filched data were not encoded. The contractor should never have been given access to customer records, he says; dummy data would have sufficed.”

These were non-production database copies, used for development and testing. There was no need for employees or contractors to interact with sensitive data. Indeed, those companies have a legal obligation not to keep production data in their development environments. All three credit card companies, and the credit bureau are customers of vendors that provide masking solutions. The contractor who loaded data for 20m individuals onto a USB stick didn’t need the real data, and should never been granted access. As with the customers I talk to, data masking surely proved too difficult to roll out in a manner that was secure and didn’t slow development, so it was relegated to shelfware.

Delphix fully automates the creation of non-production environments. It integrates with masking tools from Axis, Informatica, IBM, and others to ensure that every one of those environments is masked as a matter of mechanism rather than a manual process. What is the cost of unimplemented data masking? Obviously there are the fines and negative press, the lawsuits, and the endless mea culpas. At these credit card companies though literally dozens of executives resigned for failing to secure data, from all three CEOs on down. And in all likelihood, they had data masking solutions on the shelf, cast aside as too hard to implement.

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