“By 2020, 50% of global enterprises will have implemented at least one application release automation solution, up from less than 10% today,” according to Gartner’s new ARA Magic Quadrant report.

Application release automation and DevOps

This is the first Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation that Gartner has ever produced – a clear indication that ARA tools have a big role to play as DevOps teams strive for a continuous delivery pipeline that rapidly turns out small releases in a stable and secure fashion.

The ARA market is just six years old, but it has already grown from US$20 million in 2010 up to US$219.7 million last year, according to the report. And with enterprise adoption poised to grow by a factor of five in the next three to four years, it looks like we are at the beginning of significant investment by enterprise IT teams. Companies trying to take DevOps to the next level are looking to ARA tools to deliver.

It may be a relatively new market, but there are a number of players already jockeying for position.

There’s a strict criterion for inclusion in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Only vendors offering a comprehensive ARA solution that includes automation, environment modelling and release coordination functionalities were considered. All the companies named are also generating at least US$1 million in annual revenues solely from ARA products licensed to at least 20 paying, production-level customers.

Leaders in the ARA field

While big names like Microsoft and Puppet are described as niche players, Gartner has singled out Automic, CA Technologies, Electric Cloud, IBM, and XebiaLabs as leaders in the ARA field.

“We believe that being placed in the leader’s quadrant is a clear recognition of our product innovation and our focus on the needs of enterprise IT teams,” said Derek Langone, CEO of XebiaLabs. “It is a testament to the tremendous value our global enterprise customers have been able to create in a short period of time, as they use XebiaLabs to power the software delivery of mission critical applications, from flying satellites to space to managing transactions worth billions of dollars.”

One big reason a wide variety of industries are turning to the top ARA tools, from financial services to retail, to transportation and beyond, is the ease and speed with which they can be implemented and can scale for large organisations. This simplicity represents a significant improvement over the alternative of building custom programs and scripts to link other tools in the pipeline.

IT teams have made costly and time-consuming mistakes by trying to retrofit continuous integration tools like Jenkins and Bamboo, or provisioning tools such as Chef and Ansible. Application release automation is designed to be a central hub where companies can plan and orchestrate their software release pipeline and ensure continuous and reliable deployments.

Automation is the future

Gartner’s report mentions automation, environment modelling and release coordination as the key evaluation requirements that enterprises are looking at. ARA tools help teams to dispense with inconsistent manual methods at every stage of the product life cycle. They’re enabling businesses to manage and co-ordinate an increasingly complex set of tools, processes, and systems.

Accessibility and scalability are important too. Businesses need to be able to visualise and comprehend the progress and current status of all active releases. They also need the freedom to add new tools and technologies and integrate them into the pipeline. Easy integration with the latest technologies allows customers to retain maximum flexibility and business agility.

There’s also demand for a platform that’s accessible for management and provides a rich set of metrics. Managers need to maintain control and visibility, without hampering the autonomous decision-making that enables DevOps teams to innovate. Some orchestration tools are just too complex and technical; if you can’t extract actionable insights, all of your metrics are going to waste. And if you aren’t gathering all the right data in the first place, there’s no insight to be found.

Gartner’s ARA Magic Quadrant is defining this new space. The firm is confident that ARA tools are set to take centre stage as enterprises try to expand on the agility gains they’re made from DevOps and other automation initiatives. Companies have already dipped a toe in the water, now they’re ready to dive in with application release automation and make the promise of continuous delivery a reality.

Written by Simon Hill. Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

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The revolutions taking place in Game of Thrones have more in common with what’s happening in development than you might think.

George R.R. Marti’s epic fantasy drama set on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos chronicles the conflict among competing claimants for succession to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms. There are attempts to reclaim the throne by the realm’s deposed ruling dynasty. Game of Thrones also spans the threat of the impending winter and the legendary creatures and fierce peoples of the North. Revolutions and battles abound.

A similar revolution is taking place in development. It’s a new world, where battles over new tools are being fought over in the enterprise and won. Millennials – the population born between 1980 and 2000 with different priorities to previous generations – are now crowding the development space. They no longer want to be tied to the old world of structured toolsets from legacy vendors. They want to freedom to choose their own toolsets to develop code.

That includes open source, for example, which his fast-becoming an engine for innovation. Indeed, last year’s annual open source survey found that 67% of organisations report actively encouraging developers to engage in and contribute to open source projects.

Gone are the days when legacy vendors can force developers to use a particular type of tooling. Choice is the new watchword. Emerging toolsets deliver the pace, agility and continuous delivery organisations are crying out for. No company should be forced to wear a straightjacket made up of proprietary development styles and narrow toolsets. Instead, developers should be empowered to leverage whatever tools they prefer to use and drop their new components directly into their continuous delivery pipeline.

After all, to achieve the best end results – agile delivery and high quality apps that meet the needs of the business – your developers need freedom of choice.

The revolutions chronicled in Game of Thrones are not without their setbacks though. And the same is true of development. In the rush to innovate, many organisations can experience tool chain sprawl and disparate islands of automation, while the back-office applications continue with slow yet reliable version rollouts.

The key requirement is to link these approaches by adding agility and speed to traditional application delivery, and reliability, compliance and scale to the innovative digital applications.

Automation scales continuous delivery

In this development revolution we are witnessing a rush towards scalable release automation technologies that deliver that choice. A proactive, comprehensive and dynamic automation strategy support multiple scrum methodologies and enable enterprises to scale their continuous delivery across both back-office applications and the new digital front-office. Automation introduces speed and agility, alongside reliability and control to enable the modern agile enterprise.

Using a release automation solution, for example, your development and operations teams are able to automate the deployment pipeline from development to production across all environments in order to promote and reject versions, enact automatic rollback of changes when needed, and monitor environments from a single platform.

Your teams can also capitalise on the knowledge in automation development communities such as the Automic Marketplace. Whenever an open source developer creates new components, they can be shared with the community. Clicking on it just now, for instance, I immediately came across a Jenkins Action Pack that enables you to trigger a new build in Jenkins from Automic Release AutomationThe Jenkins Action Pack enables you to trigger a new build in Jenkins from Automic Release Automation.The Jenkins Action Pack enables you to trigger a new build in Jenkins from Automic Release Automation.

Automation also enhances the culture of your development team. The adoption of a consistent, repeatable deployment process helps your teams work as one. Application enhancements can be developed, tested and implemented in a secure and managed manner across environments, including production. Ultimately, IT ends up supporting the needs of the business more directly.

A revolution is taking place in development. Maybe not on the epic and bloody scale of Games of Thrones, but is will certainly determine how quickly organisations adapt to digital transformation.

Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

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According to Gartner Inc., DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25% of Global 2000 organisations by the end of 2016.

This projection is now being visualised by Automic as it launches new capabilities to drive the adoption of ARA (Application Release Automation) to aid clients in their DevOps journeys.

Earlier this month, Automic announced the integration of new capabilities within its product and service offerings for ARA.

“We are simplifying how our customers execute on their DevOps journey by specifically targeting all of the applications across an enterprise with the goal of driving the digital transformation required by our clients”, said Chris Boorman, Chief Marketing Officer, Automic.

Practical blueprint

These new capabilities include: a practical blueprint that enterprises can use to determine their roadmap to continuous delivery, new visualisation tools, opensource community driven content, marketplace integration, online maturity assessments and a multi-tenant cloud sandbox for businesses to try before buying.

Benefits of application release automation

ARA now allows enterprises to serve multiple departments and clients in isolation from each other on a single shared platform. Also, users now have access to the new action builder plugin inside the product that lets them build and package their own custom scripts along with a new plugin manager that allows users to deploy plugins directly from the marketplace.

“As DevOps continues to evolve, our clients ask how to scale in terms of culture and technology. The Automic blueprint provides a clear model for embracing this cultural change while the enterprise capabilities of Automic’s Release Automation platform brings speed and agility, alongside reliability and control to enable the modern agile enterprise,” said Andy Cureton, Founder and CEO of Forest Technologies.

Written by Jordan Platt

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