New App Intelligence Platform Gets Control of 'Chaos'

Bionic, a company offering a new application intelligence platform, emerged from stealth recently and caught my eye. The platform was designed to provide enterprises with the ability to understand and control the "chaos" created by the "onslaught" of application changes pushed to production every day."

"Basically, we realized is that, with everybody moving to cloud containers, Kubernetes, Agile, and DevOps, it's empowering developers like never before," Idan Ninyo, co-found and CEO, told me. "And they're releasing more and more changes into production every day. The result is developers are so empowered and independent it creates this chaos, because every developer can kind of do whatever he wants."

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company was founded in 2019 by Ninyo and CTO Eyal Mamo to manage this chaos, Ninyo said. Both co-founders spent over five years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces responsible for collecting intelligence and code decryption.

Bionic's application intelligence platform automatically reverse engineers applications to deliver a comprehensive inventory with architecture and dataflows, monitoring critical changes in production, and enabling developer "guardrails" to enforce architecture. Bionic is agentless and designed to work across all environments, from on-premises monolithic apps to hosted cloud-native microservices.

Ninyo emphasized that Bionic's offering is not an observability solution.

"You can think about this technology as a kind of automated reverse engineering engine that deciphers the architecture when the developers get out of the binary or the script or whatever it is. And by doing so, we can create a full map of the production environment within minutes.  after the point. Our current customers include developers, DevOps platform engineers, security--basically everybody needs this data."

The current pandemic could have thrown a wrench into the company's plans, but because it turned out to be something of an accelerator of digital transformation initiatives, Ninyo said, the  platform has seen a rapid adoption uptake. (He and his partner ran the launch from Tel Aviv.) Bionic's app intelligence platform is currently in use by IT, operations, and security teams at pharmaceutical, financial services, and technology companies.

"The pandemic accelerated digital transformation efforts across almost all organizations, especially since employees are working from home and enterprises are becoming more reliant on their digital offerings," Ninyo said in a follow-up email. "That has made the issue of application chaos ever more acute for enterprise IT teams. All these organizations realize that they must maintain compliance, reduce risk, and improve resiliency without slowing down the rate of development."

Posted by John K. Waters on December 17, 2020