Nolio’s Release Management Solutions on Gartner’s Shortlist
Will Nolio’s release management tools play an increasingly important function due to the rising convergence between development and operations?
According to the world’s largest information technology research and advisory company – the answer is yes!
A recent study by the IT research and advisory giants Gartner explores the changing vendor landscape in response to rising collaboration between development and operations teams. The study’s authors, Ronni J. Colville and Donna Scott, predict greater convergence in the two teams but warn that IT organizations may encounter problems due to diversities in tool adoption and maturity within specific enterprises (development and production). These complications increase with larger IT organizations, which often have different development environments, with various tools and platforms (e.g., Windows, Linux and Unix).
The study deems application provisioning as a key function in bridging the gap between application development and the operation of an application in a production environment. Application release automation (ARA) tools, as provided by Nolio, were named as a key function which adequately addresses this need.
“Since 2009, Gartner has seen an increase in client activity for ARA and configuration requirements for automating the deployment, upgrade and configuration of custom application software across development environments and into production environments, replacing manual or script-based deployment.” – Gartner Report, April 2011
ARA tools focus on deploying and promoting application software or code and associated artifacts across the application life cycle (i.e. development, testing, quality assurance, staging and production). As specified in the Gartner report, ARA solutions:
- Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates.
- Add more reliability to the deployment process with less custom scripting and by documenting variations across environments, to reduce configuration errors and downtime.
- Coordinate releases between people and process steps that are maintained manually in spreadsheets, e-mails or both.
- Move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less-costly resources.
- Speed time to market associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure across all environments.
Gartner, which deemed Nolio a ‘Cool Vendor’ in its 2011 report, put Nolio on its shortlist of vendors supplying ARA solutions.
“Nolio is an emerging vendor that offers a solution to automate release and deployment tasks throughout the system stack across the environments from preproduction to production. Its strengths are in application modeling and the breadth of automation tasks it includes.” – Gartner Report, April 2011
Click here to read the full report
