Analyst and Financial Advisors view on DevOps

Although I promised last week to talk about deployment or promotion to test and production environments, I noticed the last weeks that not only Gartner and Forrester published papers around DevOps, but also GrowthPoint Technology Partners, an M&A and financial advisory firm. So I thought that you could be interested in the Gartner, Forrester and GrowthPoint insights.

If you want the full reports, I trust you are smart enough to Google these reports and find through one or other mentioned vendor the full report. And probably there will be more analyst firms and advisors writing on DevOps, but here are just a few ones. I’ll just give you the title of the papers, author and some quotes:

Gartner

How does Gartner define Application Release Automation (ARA) and the relationship to DevOps?

Market Definition/Description

Application release automation (ARA) tools enable best practices in moving application-related artifacts, applications, configurations and even data together across the application life cycle. To do so, ARA tools provide a combination of automation, environment modeling and release coordination capabilities to simultaneously improve the quality and velocity of application releases. These tools are a key part of enabling the DevOps goal of achieving continuous delivery with large numbers of rapid, small releases.

What are the product related criteria Garnet uses for Application Release Automation tools?

  • The ARA solution must include automation, environment modeling and release coordination functionalities across no more than three individual products.
  • The ARA solution must provide the ability to use its automation, environment modeling, and release coordination functionalities in a coordinated, integrated, and consistent manner supporting the entire delivery pipeline.
  • The ARA solution or any of its components must not have a functional or commercial dependency on other products or services provided by the vendor itself or other vendors (for example, ARA functionality provided as a feature of a public cloud service or PaaS offering).

  • Automation:
  • The solution must provide a set of customizable content (tasks, components and functions) that is intended to reduce the dependence on or, in many cases, eliminate homegrown scripts or manual efforts used in the course of an application release.
  • The solution must provide the ability to utilize this content to fully automate the tasks associated with an application release.
  • Example: An application release can be automatically performed upon a developer's code commit.

  • Environment modeling:
  • The solution must have the ability to discover, use, create, and maintain models of existing or planned environments, composed of multiple application and infrastructure resources, and used to support all application life cycle/delivery pipeline stages.
  • The solution must have the ability to deploy application binaries, packages or other artifacts to target environments.

  • Release coordination:
  • The solution must provide workflow engines that assist in documenting, automating, coordinating and tracking activities (human and machine) across the various tasks associated with application deployment and governance.
  • The solution must support planning, communication and analysis while enforcing segregation of duties.
  • The solution must provide project, calendar and scheduling management capabilities.
  • The solution must allow release management activity tracking by role and individual.
  • The solution must integrate with change control and/or IT service support management (ITSSM) tools.

Forrester Research

What are for Forrester research the Key Takeaways?

Mainframe Applications Benefit From DevOps Practices That Boost Speed And Lower Risk

Mainframe application delivery does not need to be inherently slow and complex. AD&D leaders have found that automating the mainframe application delivery pipeline reduces risk, cost, and complexity while improving responsiveness to changing customer needs.

Years Of Neglect Mean The Barriers May Be Higher, But They Are Not Insurmountable

Mainframe applications have not kept pace with technological innovations. Many have not even been recompiled to optimize their performance. Modernizing application architectures and delivery processes enables them to evolve at the speed of the business.

Improving Mainframe App Delivery Speed Is A Survive-And-Thrive Imperative

The future of large enterprises depends on their ability to innovate their core business processes to better win, serve, and retain customers. Ultimately, it’s not about delivering old code faster; it’s about removing barriers to innovation in core products and processes.

GrowthPoint Technology Partners

Their point of view on why you should invest in DevOps now:

As entrepreneurs, VCs and corporate executives examine any new market and consider investing their valuable time, effort and money, one of the critical questions they ask themselves is: Why should I invest now? Considering whether an emerging market is at an inflection point is critical for timing investments to generate an above-target return. However, as the technology markets evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge the answer to this question given the efficiency with which the market operates. You need to have a strong understanding of technology innovation cycles, competitive landscapes and real customer situations to confidently invest your time and treasure into any particular trend.

DevOps is one of the markets that is under significant timing scrutiny given the growing awareness of the movement and potential value for customers and vendors. Market participants are trying to understand if this is a keyword, a cultural movement or something that the enterprise can invest in and get value out of. It’s clear that significant fundamental trends are converging to drive enterprise demand and market opportunities for solutions that accelerate the development lifecycle. Accordingly, now is a great time for companies to make the jump and invest aggressively in DevOps.

In our next post, we will talk about: Mainframe deployment (or promotion)

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About the author

Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.

Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.

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