UKG, Unisys, Choice Hotels International, and Sky Italia Honored at Data Company Conference

REDWOOD CITY, California, June 10th, 2021 -- Leading global brands were honored on June 8th at the second annual Data Company Conference. The Data Company Award winners were chosen from more than 50 nominees across diverse industries such as media, software, education, and hospitality. The winners exemplify novel and extraordinary ways of using DevOps and data automation to transform digitally and drive business growth.

“The top five companies in the world today—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—are tech companies that have mastered DevOps and data automation. Data is a major opportunity for innovation and growth for every company in every industry,” said Jedidiah Yueh, CEO of Delphix. “It’s inspiring to see enterprise leaders across industries adopt modern data technologies to transform their businesses.”

The winners by category are:

ACCELERATORS: Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG)

The award celebrates teams accelerating innovation by automating data to accelerate CI/CD workflows.

UKG was recognized for enabling more than a thousand developers across teams to use data-ready, ephemeral test environments in their CI/CD pipelines with rapid spin-up and spin-down capabilities via APIs. Data automation enabled the company to have easy snapshotting capabilities for test restores, shrunk its hardware footprint, with storage reduced by as much as 95%. This allowed them to give developers access to larger datasets and make it easier to set up more complex data scenarios without paying the storage costs. All of this gave a big boost to developer productivity. It also sets them up for a fiscally responsible transition to the private cloud.

All of this makes it easier and faster for UKG to respond to customer demands—a

critical ability during and post COVID-19. The company’s product enhancements made it easier for customers to handle taxes, payments, and leave management in compliance with COVID-related legislation.

GUARDIANS: Sky Italia

The Guardians award recognizes teams that reduce business risk by consistently ensuring data compliance and security with automated data masking across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Sky Italia was recognized for successfully masking data on 25 core business applications in 5 months. The company initially provisioned 50 virtual databases but quickly expanded it to 300+ virtual databases in 18 months, allowing its test teams to have more integrated environments.

This helped Sky Italia meet the GDPR deadline and continue to stay in compliance with the regulation. It also accelerated their testing cycles resulting in faster application development and innovation.

PIONEERS: Unisys and California State University (CSU)

The Pioneers award recognizes teams significantly increasing the scope of data available for training AI/ML models.

CSU works with IT services company Unisys to implement its hybrid cloud strategy and modernize its IT infrastructure.

Unisys and the California State University (CSU) were recognized for consolidating, virtualizing, and migrating data across 23 campuses as part of the university’s hybrid cloud data strategy. CSU wanted to make its massive ERP CMS system more accessible and actionable across its highly distributed campuses while safeguarding mission-critical information that exists both on-premises and in the cloud.  CSU leverages data as a strategic asset.  Data automation helped CSU deliver data more quickly and frequently to application development teams across the campuses.  Additionally, by automating data access and making it more consumable by the campuses, CSU is now able to use its data for AI/ML algorithm training to better know and understand the campuses and their habits, so they can better anticipate their needs and improve outcomes for its students.

The AI/ML initiatives help the university serve its various campuses and support multiple initiative programs, including CSU’s multifaceted and multi-year initiative aimed at increasing graduation rates.

GAME-CHANGER: Jason Simpson, VP of Engineering, Choice Hotels International

The award recognizes individual difference-makers driving transformational change within a company.

Jason Simpson is a global technology leader with over 25 years of software development and IT experience across start-ups, government, and large public companies. At Choice Hotels International, he leads the company’s IT Infrastructure, Operations, and Corporate Technology organizations.

Simpson was recognized for leading the migration of more than 130 applications from legacy systems to the cloud and driving the adoption of programmable data infrastructure to automate data compliance and data delivery. This helped Choice Hotels break down data silos and better protect customer data, allowing its software teams to significantly improve the speed and quality of application testing and development.

Through this migration, Choice Hotels has continued to innovate and leverage its cloud-based global reservation system and distribution platform to support its franchisees and reach more customers worldwide.

“We are proud to partner with UKG, Unisys, Choice Hotels International, and Sky Italia on their digital transformation journeys. Their success is proof that every company is a data company and that DevOps plus data is the backbone of transformation in the digital world,” said Alex Hesterberg, Chief Customer Officer at Delphix.

About Delphix
Delphix is the pioneer in programmable data infrastructure. Delphix automates the biggest constraint in digital transformation programs—the data. Cloud, CI/CD, and AI/ML all have a voracious appetite for data and development environments. With our multicloud data platform, enterprises can adopt cloud 30% faster, release software 50% faster, and access 90% more data for AI/ML, while protecting personal data privacy and maintaining compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc. For more information, visit www.delphix.com or follow us on LinkedIn,  Twitter, and Facebook.