It stands to reason that, the faster an application release or update moves through the stages for release, the more money a company can make. So why not adopt the concept of a production line for deploying applications? It worked for the auto industry! But what exactly does that mean for an application release and for everyone involved?

According to the Collins English Dictionary, a production line is a factory system in which parts of components of the end product are transported by a conveyor through a number of different sites at each of which a manual or machine operation is performed on them without interrupting the flow of production.

Applying this concept is simple. All you need is an application release automation tool such as Nolio ASAP. Automation is what creates the application production line, pushing along a product through each station and preventing delays.

With a manual deployment, an application has to go through the various departments and inevitably gets stuck for extended periods of time. Because each team is only focused on their one purpose, they aren’t paying attention to how their actions will affect previous or future tasks. In addition, as a result of manual work, the chance of introducing errors increases ten-fold. The application production line streamlines the release process eliminating ineffective manual developments and ensuring predictability.

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s Application Release Automation Platform

Click here to download the White Paper ‘Application Release Automation with Zero Touch Deployment’

Click here to read ‘Application Deployment 101’

In a recent Gartner report, analyst Ronni J. Colville answers this question and more!

Today, formal processes between developers and production engineers are few and far between. This lack of an established system as well as limited communications in many of today’s organizations is specifically targeted as barriers to a successful DevOps practice.

The problems in communication are often due to the deployment processes. When the developers finish a code, they place it in a repository. The operation team picks it up and runs preproduction testing to confirm that updates and enhancements are in sync with existing development environments, which they rarely are. Communication along the application production line is extremely limited. Achieving clear and effective communication between developers, QA and operations is a near miracle.

Application release automation solutions can resolve these issues by allowing complete visibility so that everyone can see what is happening in the various stages of application deployment, allowing the process to be streamlined. Tools such as Nolio ASAP provide a graphical interface and can automate alerts so that stakeholders know exactly where an application stands in the release process as well as what needs to be done next and by whom.  In addition, visibility requires the establishment of a model of the application and its configuration for each environment. For optimal visibility, however, we need more than just a transparent process. A major benefit of application release automation tools is that they provide a means to create application models in various environments with externalized and variable configuration settings.

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

Click here to read the full Gartner report

Click here to learn more about Gartner analyst Ronni J. Colville

In our latest webinar, ‘Zero Touch BizTalk Deployments’, Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron will show how you can fully automate complex deployments for your Microsoft BizTalk applications! He will demonstrate how the successful realization of fully automated application releases can reduce errors, lower costs, increase operational throughput and accelerate time-to-market!

Mr. Gidron will explain how you can:

1. Achieve full control of BizTalk applications, host instances, orchestrations and bindings
2. Fully automate all aspects of applications deployment and configuration
3. Create reusable deployment processes across multiple BizTalk versions
4. Reduce your dependency on command line and complex manual deployments of BizTalk applications.

“Using Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ platform can dramatically improve application deployments. We have a number of out-of-the-box actions that can seamlessly run across multiple servers regardless of version.  Our platform for Zero Touch Deployment™ is fast, reliable, reusable and completely manageable. It will save everyone the time and headache caused by deploying BizTalk applications!” – Ron Gidron, Nolio Product Director

Following the presentation, all participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question & answer session with Mr. Gidron.

This webinar will be held on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT.  Click here to register today.

We will also be hosting a webinar, ‘Achieving Zero Touch Deployment™ in a Microsoft TFS Environment’ on Wednesday, January 25^th, 2012 at 10am GMT. Click here to learn more and register now.

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deployment.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

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™

Application releases are known to be time consuming, tedious and error prone. IT organizations typically release major applications on a quarterly or semi-annual cycle in an attempt to limit downtime. This is done for a number of reasons, the most time-consuming of which is the tedious process of production testing. Additionally, the scripting required to release applications cause a myriad of delays because:

1. Scripts produced to manage the installation process can be very complex

2. Scripts are not centrally managed, hindering their integrity

3. Lack of consistency in script writing as each engineer has a unique style

In her report, Ronni J. Colville identifies one of the key benefits of application release automation tools as their ability to minimize human error. This is especially crucial because finding a mistake in a manually produced script is the IT equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack. This is not to say that existing scripts will become irrelevant. With many ARA tools on the market, Nolio ASAP included, previously created scripts can be converted into templates and operated via the automated solution.

Additionally, less custom scripting ensures an added reliability in the deployment process, reducing the need for configurations. And with 450 actions available out of the box, there are no limitations on what you can achieve.

With application release automation tools, deployments are more reliable, quicker and guarantee less downtime.

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

Click here to read the full Gartner report

We first ran our webinar ‘Enhancing Hudson Continuous Integration with Zero Touch Deployment™‘ in October. More than 500 people registered for this free educational session, which demonstrated how Hudson CI and Jenkins users can overcome common complexities and challenges encountered on this server in order to execute fully automated deployments.

This online seminar was extremely popular and many Hudson and Jenkins users were disappointed to miss out. This is particularly true for our European audiences, who were unable to attend due to the timing of the webinar – which was held at a time primarily for American viewers.

So, we’re running this event again. And this time we’re staging it at an ideal time for our European followers. The second Hudson CI online seminar will be held at 10am GMT/11am Central European Time on Thursday, December 15, 2011.

Join us and learn how you can facilitate:

1. Zero Touch Deployment™  for any environment
2. Complete traceability from every deployment
3. The ability to deploy every single build for smoke/sanity testing

The session will be led by Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron, who will also show a live demo as part of his presentation and be available for a dedicated ‘Question and Answer’ session at the end of the webinar.

“With Hudson CI, development teams are able to integrate their work frequently. However, with today’s complex applications, standard continuous integration ‘build and test’ models cannot sufficiently guarantee the software will be fully operational. The application must be deployed into an environment. Hudson CI is currently inadequate to support multi-tier and multi-platform synchronizations and extremely complex environments. However, the implementation of a Zero Touch Deployment™ process enables continuous automated deployments and offers complete traceability of every application release.”
Ron Gidron, Product Director at Nolio

Click here to register and find out more about the webinar.

This free educational webinar will explain how to seamlessly combine the management of your applications with fully automated release deployment processes and make time-consuming manual changes and upgrades a thing of the past. Nolio’s Product Director, Ron Gidron, will explain how full integration of Zero Touch Deployment™ with ServiceNow can increase the time-to-production, reduce bottlenecks, eliminate manual errors and ensure IT governance and compliance.

To give you a better idea of the areas this presentation will cover, we’ve put an exclusive preview of the webinar highlights online. The preview covers the agenda, the roles of change management and application deployment and the benefits of Zero Touch Deployment™ and integration.

In addition to explaining how ServiceNow users can have rapid and accurate deployments along with complete auditability, visibility and control, Mr. Gidron will present a live demo so that you can see how it’s done for yourself. Following the webinar, participants will have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session with Mr. Gidron.

We wanted to ensure that both our American and European audiences can enjoy this webinar – so we’re holding it twice!

Click here to register and learn more about Wednesday’s webinar.

Click here to register and learn more about our European ServiceNow webinar on December 14, 2011.

Click here to view recorded webinars on Zero Touch Deployment™.

Click here to download the white paper ‘Application Release Automation with Zero Touch Deployment™’.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

‘Integrating Zero Touch Deployment™ with ServiceNow for Faster & Easier Application Releases’ is a free educational webinar that will show you how full integration of Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ process with ServiceNow can increase the time-to-production, reduce bottlenecks, eliminate manual errors and ensure IT governance and compliance.

Led by Nolio’s Product Director, Ron Gidron, this webinar will show you how to integrate fully automated deployment processes with ServiceNow’s change management and CMDB as well as:

1. Link to a Zero Touch Deployment™ Process from within ServiceNow
2. Schedule Automated Deployments
3. Control & Manage Automatic Deployment Processes
4. Maintain and Integrate all Existing Rules and Data
5. Automatically Document all Deployment Processes
6. Ensure Full Control and Visibility

“Managing change or deployments in ServiceNow requires a series of time-consuming manual steps. Full integration with Nolio ASAP allows users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspect of their current application management system. Users will have rapid and accurate deployments along with complete auditability, visibility and control.” – Ron Gidron, Nolio Product Director

All participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question & answer session with Mr. Gidron at the end of the webinar.

We wanted to ensure that both our American and European audiences can enjoy this webinar – so we’re holding it twice!

The US webinar will be held on November 30, 2011 (9am PST/12pm EST). Click here to register for the US webinar.

The European webinar will be held on December 14, 2011 at (10am GMT/11 am CET). Click here to register for the European webinar.

Click here for more information.

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Nolio prides itself on innovation and is constantly striving to give you the best possible service. We also believe in listening to our community. So we’re giving you the opportunity to choose the design of this Wednesday’s live webinar on achieving Zero Touch Deployment™ in a Hudson Continuous Integration (Hudson CI) environment.

In our previous webinars, we have used presentation slides with traditional technical displays and bullet points. For our upcoming Hudson webinar, we would like to update the look and feel of our presentation with colorful graphics and images.

Here are two versions of one presentation slide for the Hudson Webinar.  Slide A adheres to our traditional technical style and Slide B is an example of our new approach.

We want to know which style you prefer. Cast your vote now!

Rest assured that whatever style we opt for, the content of the webinar will stay the same. As always, the webinar will be packed with valuable and useable information on how you can improve your application deployment processes.

MORE ABOUT THIS WEEK’S HUDSON CI WEBINAR

Enhancing Hudson Continuous Integration with Zero Touch Deployment™ will be held on Wednesday, October 26th at 4pm Central European Time / 10am Eastern Daylight Time / 7am Pacific Daylight Time.

This live webinar will show you how to create a true continuous integration environment with complex multi-tier application release deployments. Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron will demonstrate how you can enhance Continuous Integration in Hudson by implementing Zero Touch Deployment™. He will also show how you can ensure complete traceability from every deployment back to Hudson and deploy builds for smoke testing. Registration is free!

Click here to register now

Keen to improve their application deployment processes, hundreds of IT professionals attended yesterday’s live webinar to learn how they can successfully achieve Zero Touch Deployment™ in an agile organization.

“Zero Touch Deployment – Part II – The Analyst Panel” kicked off with a view of Zero Touch Deployments™ from the analyst’s perspective.  Forrester’s Principal Analyst Jeffrey Hammond started the session by exploring the growing need to streamline release management techniques to reduce the gulf between agile development practices and time-consuming deployment processes.

Application release expert and Nolio Co-Founder Eran Sher followed up Mr. Hammond’s presentation by demonstrating how Zero Touch Deployment™ can be implemented in an organization to complement agile processes. He showed participants how they can use these fully automated release practices to overcome the challenges and complexities often associated with application deployments. Webinar attendees were then able to view a live demo and pose their questions directly to Mr. Hammond and Mr. Sher in a dedicated question and answer session.

But don’t worry if you missed yesterday’s event – it doesn’t mean you have to miss out entirely! We recorded the session so you can view the full webinar online.  Plus you still have the chance to ask your application deployment questions to the experts. Simply email your enquiry to clare@noliosoft.com and your question will be handled by an expert in the field.

Click here to view the event online.

DON’T MISS OUR NEXT WEBINAR!

Interested in finding out more about Zero Touch Deployment™? We’re holding our next webinar ‘Achieving Zero Touch Deployment in a Microsoft TFS Environment‘ on Wednesday, October 5 at 4pm CEST / 10am EDT. Led by application release expert Ron Gidron, this webinar will show you how to fully automate complex deployments while working in a Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) environment.

Find out more and register here