Atos has 78,500 employees in 42 different countries and boasts annual revenue of EUR 8.7 billion. With its technology expertise and industry knowledge, it provides services to clients across many sectors, including manufacturing, retail, financial services, and media and technology to name a few. Partnering with Nolio, it has captured and standardized the application change and maintenance process for its customers. As a result, its clients can enjoy fast, reliable and cost-effective application deployment processes.

“By expanding our portfolio with Nolio’s platform we can better position ourselves as providers of high-quality application management services that meet the specific needs of our customers. Innovation, quality, flexibility and predictability are the most important principles. With Nolio, we can simplify the management of the most complex, heterogeneous application environments and minimize business risks.” – Marnix Harssema, Head of Portfolio Management, Benelux Atos

The bottom line is that, by adopting one comprehensive application release automation platform, Atos has managed to improve the quality, flexibility and management of its application production line. Automated processes have minimized their risk of service interruption when introducing new applications or versions and have dramatically improved Atos’ time-to-market of new products.

While Nolio has had success with Atos and other companies working in IT services, it doesn’t end there. Companies ranging from online media to SaaS, retail to banking and finance have achieved similar successes with their switch to application release automation. When will you make the switch?

Click here to view the Dutch Press Release

Click here to read more client success stories

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deployment™

Numerous global enterprises, online services and SaaS businesses already rely on Nolio to meet the mounting challenges and complexities of releasing and managing applications across the data center. Now Nolio has launched its latest version, Nolio ASAP 3.3, offering its clients more features and benefits than ever before.

New features in Nolio ASAP 3.3 include:

1. Centralized Logging
Engineers can log data from any environment or server to a centralized location. This enables engineers to coordinate their work more easily and enhances troubleshooting and tracking capabilities.

2. Selecting ‘Users’ for Processes and Workflows
Engineers can select which ‘user’ their processes and workflows will run on. All processes and workflows will automatically be executed according to the security permissions of the assigned ‘user’. This means that all actions and processes can be executed with the exact security permissions required for the operation.

3. Exporting Processes to XML
All Nolio’s processes can be exported to an XML file. XML is the ideal format to store processes and it supports in-house versioning tools, which can be used to keep track of changes.

4. Design, Environment and Administration Auditing
Nolio ASAP 3.3 provides a full audit trail for any changes that occurred in the platform. All changes and updates in actions, workflows, processes, environment configurations, and administration tasks are automatically logged and available to the system administrator.

5. Embedded JavaScript Interpreter
Nolio can now inherently execute JavaScript within actions and workflows. JavaScript can be used to perform complex processes, such as text and array manipulation, mathematical calculations, and HTTP and web operations.

If you have any questions about these new features or Nolio ASAP in general, please contact clare@noliosoft.com.

As a leading provider of human capital management cloud solutions, Ultimate Software has an obligation to its global clients to ensure application changes are deployed accurately and efficiently. Frustrated by the limitations of Symantec Altiris’ solutions, the company conducted a thorough and robust evaluation of today’s key application deployment providers. The research led them to the conclusion that Serena, powered by Nolio, is able to offer the best automated processes on the market today.

This is not the first time that a leading global enterprise has replaced Symantec Altiris with Nolio. In August 2011, 888 Holdings choose Nolio over Altiris for an enterprise-wide license solution. Like Ultimate Software, 888 reached this decision following a thorough investigation of application release solutions.

So why does Symantec Altiris keep losing to Nolio? Ultimate Software found Altiris lacking in its application release procedures and chose Nolio due to its unsurpassed ability to manage application complexities, improve operational efficiencies and streamline deployment processes.

“We realized that existing infrastructure automation solutions, such as Altiris, can do a good job when you need to provision new servers, but when it comes to application releases and deployments, it’s a different story. We look forward to leveraging Nolio’s Release Automation solution as our unified deployments solution and ensuring the highest level of security and reliability”
Brian Goldberg, Director of Infrastructure and Deployment Strategy at Ultimate Software.

Ultimate Software discovered that it could significantly reduce its application release deployment times and operational costs by switching to Nolio ASAP. Nolio’s solutions include many unique features which enable it to continually surpass the competition. Click here to view the full list of features that Nolio offers but Symantec Altiris doesn’t.

View the full press release

Download our white paper ‘Requirements for an Application Release Automation Platform’

According to the latest Gartner report by Ronni J. Colville, the answer is yes!  As an emerging movement, DevOps may have improved communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams but it still hasn’t absolutely mastered its ultimate goal of unifying their work.  In her report, Ronni J. Colville argues that DevOps can be greatly enhanced by the use of application release automation (ARA) tools and specifically cites Nolio as one such solution.The report identifies one of the key benefits of ARA tools as their facility to improve communications and visibility between teams. Lack of established processes between development and IT operations teams and limited communications in many of today’s organizations are specifically pinpointed as barriers to a successful DevOps practice.

However, she argues that ARA solutions can resolve these issues by providing visibility to the workflow for stakeholders who participate in release and deployment activities. They also provide email interfaces and can alert stakeholders to the status of each automation task. Visibility also requires the establishment of a model of the application and its configuration for each environment. ARA tools can provide a mechanism to create application models for each environment, with externalized configuration settings that typically vary by environment.

As a result, they can provide the visibility and mechanisms to reduce the gulf between development and operations teams.

Click here to find out more about Nolio’s ARA tools

Click here to read the full Gartner report

In a fascinating interview, we asked Lombard Odier’s Technical Architect Yann Albou why the bank decided to deploy with Nolio and what benefits they have witnessed since the transition. Mr. Albou described the manifold challenges and frustrations that Lombard Odier previously faced with application deployments.

He said: “We have approximately 20 to 30 application deployments a week and there are manifold complexities with every release. Every application deployment requires multi-tier updates, dynamic amendments of application property files, modifications of xml files and system updates.

“As a result, deployments for complex applications were taking up to two hours each.  We needed to significantly reduce this time in order to keep up with business demands and maintain agility in the development group.”

Founded in Geneva in 1796, Lombard Odier is one of the largest private bankers in Europe, specializing in asset management and estate planning. The company’s evolution and future success in this extremely competitive market space was dependent on its ability to accelerate its time to production while ensuring the highest level of security for its clients.

The firm decided to establish a reliable and consistent automation of its release processes by adopting Nolio’s innovative solutions.

Mr. Albou said: “With Nolio we are able to monitor precise details, figures and measurements of each deployment, including specifics on the changes made, dates and times of releases and success rates. As private bankers, security is our top concern and it is vital that we have this transparency.

Our time to production is also extremely important. We’ve dramatically reduced our release times by using Nolio’s automated solutions. We are confident that by running Nolio across all our environments, we will reduce times for complicated deployments from two hours to twenty minutes.”

Click here to read the full interview

Click here to read the press release

The 2011 HypeCycle Report is an invaluable guide for businesses and enterprises, offering an objective and practical insight into the effectiveness and value of the latest management technologies and processes. The guide empowers businesses to decide which technology innovations are worth adopting, postponing or ignoring altogether.

Application Release Automation (ARA) is named as an innovative and emerging field in this year’s report. Gartner analysts Ronni J. Colville and Donna Scott studied Nolio and other ARA providers to provide businesses with a crucial understanding of the benefits and value of these solutions.

The analyst team reported that the adoption of ARA solutions is becoming increasingly widespread – especially with large enterprises that have mission-critical websites and therefore must improve agility with as little disruption as possible. They identified five key benefits of an application release automation solution:

1. The elimination of the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates.
2. The reduction of configuration errors and downtime.
3. The ability to coordinate releases between people and process steps that are maintained manually in spreadsheets and/or emails.
4. The capacity to move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less costly resources.
5. The ability to increase the speed of time to market in line with agile development methodologies.

“ARA tools can eliminate the need to build and maintain time-consuming custom scripts for application updates. They can add more reliability to the deployment process with less custom scripting and by documenting variations across environments, to reduce configuration errors and downtime.  The most significant business benefit of ARA tools is that they improve the speed associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure applications across all environments by creating consistent application models that improve the likelihood of successful deployments to production.”
- Gartner Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011

Earlier this year Gartner also deemed Nolio as a ‘Cool Vendor’ in its annual report on innovative new technology providers.   It also put Nolio’s release management solutions on its shortlist of top vendors.

The news came as no surprise to our research and development teams who pride themselves on delivering first-rate comprehensive application deployment solutions that continually surpass the competition.

Here are just some of the features that you can enjoy with Nolio but not with Symantec Altiris:

1. The ability to automate multi-tier workflows across distributed data centers without manual intervention.
2. The ability to perform “one click” automation processes on distributed and heterogeneous servers (physical, virtual and cloud).
3. The ability to perform “one click” automation processes on multi-tier & multi-server workflows with trigger-dependent action rules between the application tiers.
4. The capacity to store and share parameters per application, application component and environment.
5. Access to a single view clearly displaying the workflows across application tiers.
6. Access to a clear view of all application workflows displaying all available workflows per application.

Still not convinced? Click here to view a full list of features offered by Nolio and Symantec Altiris.

“There are a number of key aspects that must be thoroughly evaluated in any application deployment solution. These include the speed of automation development, the rate of deployment execution, the reliability and resilience of the deployment and release management. When compared to Nolio, Altiris is lacking in each one of these areas.”
– Ron Gidron, Product Manager at Nolio

To help IT operations teams decide upon the best solution, we’ve written a white paper outlining all the essential requirements of an application deployment platform. Download Requirements for an Application Release Automation Platform today!

Click here to read a press release on the new contract with 888 Holdings

Click here to view a detailed list of product features and comparisons

Nolio has equipped Commerzbank with the ability to deploy database schema changes without manual intervention across all environments, enabling IT operations teams to match the tempo of agile development processes for the first time.

Commerzbank has more than 15 million clients and is Germany’s foremost bank for private and corporate customers. Multiple application releases and database changes are required every day, and secure and swift time-to-market is of the utmost importance. The IT team started exploring various application deployment solutions when it became apparent that the operations department was unable to keep pace with the high frequency of releases issued by the agile development teams.

The company opted for Nolio due to its innovative and comprehensive solutions, ability to deploy database updates to all environments and support both Oracle and Sybase. Nolio swiftly implemented its ‘Zero Touch Deployment’ process,  which enables application releases to be rapidly and automatically deployed to pre-production and production environments without the need for manual intervention.

Since implementing Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment process, Commerzbank has recorded the following benefits:

1. Throughput has significantly increased
2. IT Operations teams can now match the tempo of agile development processes
3. Database schema changes can be made rapidly across all environments
4. Databases can be automatically populated with testing data.
5. Bottlenecks no longer obstruct application deployments
6. Manual errors have been eliminated
7. Operational costs have reduced significantly

By implementing zero touch deployment processes, Commerzbank has enabled the realization of agile operations from development to production.  The deployment schedule now matches the tempo of the development cycle and application changes and upgrades are released rapidly, efficiently and accurately.

Click here to read the full press release

Click here to read the client case study

Read more of Nolio’s customer success stories

Nolio signs OEM agreement with business partner Serena, realizing their joint vision to deliver a robust and comprehensive release management solution to the IT market.

“Nolio and Serena share a united vision – to deliver an innovative and robust combination of ALM and release automation solutions to the IT market. Together, we are able to ensure that release automation works seamlessly as part of an end-to-end ALM suite.  We are delighted with the new contract, which empowers us to continue bringing this unique and advanced solution to our customers,” said Eran Sher, EVP of Products & Business Development and Co-Founder of Nolio.