IT process automation software company UC4 Software and CollabNet, a provider of enterprise cloud development and Agile ALM products and services, are jointly developing, marketing, selling and supporting a DevOps platform. The companies say the partnership supports their mutual goals of driving agility and collaboration across the entire IT organization by offering a single, common platform that manages all aspects of emerging DevOps and continuous delivery initiatives.
DevOps is an emerging IT management approach in which development and IT operations staff work closer together through the application development and deployment cycle.
CollabNet's TeamForge ALM platform transforms enterprise application development through its community architecture approach to Agile ALM. It is used by hundreds of enterprises to simplify and manage the growing complexity of faster release cycles, global distributed teams, and the hybrid use of processes, tools and clouds. UC4's Application Release Automation platform automates and orchestrates all activities involved in application deployment and operations, allowing for different environments, owners and processes to work in unison.
There are three trends fueling the need for this solution, Randy Clark, CMO at UC4, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is that applications and infrastructures have gotten more complex. With Agile development and virtualization, both the application environment and the infrastructure environment are highly dynamic and when interdependencies break, the application breaks. A second fundamental issue is that the pressure for IT to become business technology is “immense” and the speed at which development must take place coupled with greater complexity, goes to the third issue, which is that the cost of downtime and the cost of failure is increasingly high. When applications break, the customer experience is diminished, and brand loyalty can come under pressure resulting in customer churn and in some cases compliance issues as well, ultimately at great cost to businesses. “There is more complexity, more pressure to innovate, and more costs associated with downtime. It is an age-old problem, but I think it has reached the boiling point.”
UC4 came to the realization that “we cannot solve this alone and CollabNet came to the same realization,” says Clark, who cited an industry statistic that 80% of all IT issues are caused by new applications. “They had no intention of going into Ops and we had no intention of going into Dev. But we both see the constraints by not having the other side of the coin.”
For CollabNet, the key component of this combined solution embeds UC4's Application Release Automation functionality within CollabNet's TeamForge Agile ALM platform, introducing a new deployment automation offering called "CollabNet Deploy with UC4" to its customers and prospects. This new product offering provides the bridge between the industry's leading Agile ALM platform from CollabNet and the IT automation platform from UC4.
For UC4, the addition of TeamForge to the UC4 IT automation platform offers a complete development through IT operations solution for its customers and prospects. These combined solutions comprise an Enterprise DevOps platform that will automate the entire development-through-deployment process across a range of on-premise and external clouds – including code, build, test, release, deployment and IT automation – to achieve continuous, reliable application releases at scale.
According to the companies, as DevOps and Continuous Delivery gain traction and adoption increases, IT organizations need strong governance, cross-team coordination and traceability to succeed and scale these initiatives across the enterprise. CollabNet Deploy with UC4 includes the core technology of UC4 embedded within TeamForge to form a unified platform that provides complete cross-function data and workflow automation, integrated reporting, lifecycle traceability and the ability to gain real-time visibility across roles, projects, departments and geographies. Through a single-pane-of-glass interface, IT organizations can now automate and streamline the entire application development, build and deployment lifecycle to improve software agility, productivity and team collaboration.
For more information about the companies, go to www.UC4.com and www.collab.net.