Technology Reseller v40

technologyreseller.co.uk BUSINESS PROFILE 47 thing as it makes our offering more unique. TR: Could vendors and distributors do more to help you overcome these challenges? And if so, what? LW: I would make the same point about vendors and distributors. Being more transparent and giving a fair and honest playing field to all their reseller partners is the best way to ensure the end client receives the best available solution. TR: Are customers become more demanding, and if so, in what ways? LW: Yes, for sure, and rightly so. The customer is and always should be at the heart of everything we do, and now, more than ever, customers are looking for more from their supply chain. This is a good thing as it sorts the wheat from the chaff. When it comes to engaging with a supplier and entrusting IT critical functions to them, you want a company that is going to be here not just tomorrow but next year and the year after that. One thing that should never go out of fashion is providing excellent customer service and part of our mission is to build relationships so that we fully understand the needs of our partners and our customers. TR: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? LW : In all honesty, I wouldn’t change a thing. We have an open-door policy at ICC and staff empowerment is key. I love to see every member of our team push themselves to grow and develop. There is nothing better than seeing a team member who started as an apprentice or with zero knowledge of our industry grow, develop and obtain the nice things in life. That is what I enjoy about being a business owner. https://theicc.group Introducing Payara Services Recent winner of a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade, open source software company Payara Services is about to launch a new hosted platform that will expand its user base to smaller application development organisations. Technology Reseller finds out more from Founder and CEO Steve Millidge How does the Payara Platform cater to the needs of Java developers and the wider Java community? Primarily, the Payara Platform implements the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile specifications. These are industry standard Java APIs that millions of developers use every day to build large scale internet- facing applications. The Payara team contribute to the development and evolution of these APIs alongside industry giants like Oracle, IBM and RedHat. We look to develop these APIs to meet the needs of the Java developer community. We engage with the community through forums, social media, mailing lists and surveys to determine what they need from the platform. Being open source, there are no barriers to the Payara team working with the community to drive the standards to meet their needs. In addition, when building the Payara Platform, we work to build the best developer and operations experience. We can develop and evolve Payara’s software through the open source development process – with a community of contributors spanning the globe. We aim to release our software ‘early and often’ so we can gather feedback from users and hone the software to their needs. Payara releases monthly updates of the Payara Platform – what do these consist of and how important are they to your users? As mentioned above, part of our open source philosophy is to release the Payara Platform to the community early and often, and releasing the software monthly is key to that. By rapidly releasing these features, the community has a greater opportunity to try out, comment and suggest changes that would make the software better. Our monthly releases (as well as being key to developing future features) also contain any bug fixes, ensuring that quality is maintained. Tell us about Payara Services in just a few sentences. Payara is a born-global, micro- multinational software company headquartered in the UK, with offices in Portugal. We are an organisation with a ‘remote first’ hiring approach, meaning we have customers and team members across the world. Our open source software tools are used to build transactional cloud-native web applications, making us a recognised leader in the creation of innovative infrastructure software for today and tomorrow and allowing us to gain a community of users and contributors that span the globe. What is the Payara Platform and how is it different to other open source product offerings? The Payara Platform consists of open source server runtimes for development projects and containerised Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications. Developers create applications using the industry standard Jakarta EE and MicroProfile APIs and then deploy their application on the Payara Platform. The Payara Platform ensures that their application runs with optimum performance, scalability and manageability. Our team is always focused on ensuring that we provide the Java developer community with the best experience. Our goal is to provide a platform that enables the developer to take their application and scale from edge devices like Raspberry Pis; through traditional infrastructure, like servers and VMs; to containers and Kubernetes; right through to hyper-scale public cloud providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. We want developers to concentrate on building their applications while we take care of the infrastructure. continued...