News

Vendors Team Up To Provide DevOps Platform

• By John K. Waters
• December 13, 2012

Agile ALM provider CollabNet is partnering with IT automation vendor UC4 to provide what the two companies are billing as the world's first DevOps platform. The partnership combines CollabNet's TeamForge Agile ALM platform with UC4's Application Release Automation (ARA) functionality.

This is essentially a two-way resell agreement, in which UC4 will be reselling CollabNet's TeamForge product as UC4 TeamForge, and CollabNet will be reselling UC4's ARA product as CollabNet Deploy with UC4. But the deal also underscores the growing interest in bringing development and IT Operations closer together in the enterprise.

The primary goal of the movement to better coordinate the work of enterprise application development teams and IT operations -- DevOps -- is to deliver software faster. Industry analyst firm Gartner describes the DevOps movement as one "born of the need to improve IT service delivery agility," and even argues that it has underpinnings in the Agile Manifesto, "which emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams." Gartner analyst Ronni J. Colville has written that application deployment is the weak link in the DevOps chain, and that "deployment automation improves the consistency, reliability and visibility of the application deployments across all these environments."

The CollabNet-UC4 partnership combines a leading Agile app lifecycle product with a leading IT automation product with the aim of providing a development-through-IT-operations solution. The combined products provide a means of orchestrating all activities involved in app deployment, explained Jim Ensell, CollabNet's chief marketing and strategy officer. CollabNet has built an integration to the UC4 tool with a web UI that sits inside TeamForge itself and puts the release automation capabilities into the hands of developers.

"This is enterprise DevOps at scale," Ensell told ADTmag. "It addresses the growing tension that occurs between agility-minded developers and control-oriented IT operations guys."

Brisbane, California-based CollabNet's TeamForge is an integrated, Web-based platform designed to allow distributed software development teams to work collaboratively throughout the application lifecycle. UC4's flagship ONE Automation platform is a process-centric IT Process Automation (IPA) platform that automates and orchestrates all activities involved in app deployment and operations.

"At the heart of the DevOps challenge is application release," Ensell said. "That's the major hurdle. What companies need to be able to do is release at the pace of continuous integration. They need to be able to push out new releases rapidly and automatically. They need to be able to push out maintenance releases and patches, hotfixes and new integrations. And they also need to be able to support the collaboration of the dev folks with the ops folks in ways have haven't traditionally been done."

More information about CollabNet Deploy with UC4 is available on the CollabNet Web site.